CRUCIFYING MANKIND
From 1876-1892, the U.S. Presidential elections were decidedly lackluster affairs. (The 1876 Hayes-Tilden election is a possible exception, but only because it became interesting, as did the 2000 election, after election day ended, when the election was INDISPUTABLY stolen from Samuel Tilden). The elections of 1880, 1884, 1888 and 1892 were all rather close in terms of popular and electoral votes, featured unmemorable candidates and unmemorable characters, and low turnout rates.
But then came 1896. At the Democratic convention in Chicago (back then, conventions were held to actually DECIDE who was to be the nominee, as opposed to coronate a pre-selected one), no one knew who was to be the nominee when the convention began. A young, silver (no, not brown)-tongued orator (and religious zealot) named William Jennings Bryan was one of the last potential nominees to speak. He enthralled the audience with perhaps the most famous line ever uttered at a political convention.
A hot issue in 1896 was whether to allow coinage of silver such that 16 pieces of a certain weight of silver would be the monetary equivalent of one piece of a pre-defined weight of gold. The Republicans - then the party of the rich as well, hated this idea, viewing silver as "funny money" whose coinage would lead to inflation and to other countries' viewing the dollar with suspicion (back then, we were on the gold standard; the dollar was backed by gold in case the dollar went belly-up). Democrats, however, felt that a supply of silver entering the market would provide economic relief to agrarian and other lower-income interests, and that such silver would give them "a currency of their own" to use as a bargaining tool. Republicans in the 1896 election, including the Republican nominee, William McKinley, were called "Goldbugs," while Democrats like Bryan were called "silverites."
The famous line: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns! You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" The crowd went wild. Bryan instantly became the Democratic nominee.
The Bryan-McKinley contest is now viewed as the first modern Presidential election. Firstly, because Bryan, unlike any other candidate before him, traveled throughout the country giving stump speeches. Secondly, because McKinley, while still conducing a traditional "front porch" campaign (in which visitors would come to HIM), spent an ungodly sum of money essentially running a smear campaign against Bryan, threatening that if Bryan won, markets would collapse and industry would turn to ruin. McKinley outspent Bryan by about 10-1, aided by his brilliant fellow Ohioain politican strategist, Mark Hanna. The result: McKinley won a quasi-landslide, 296 electoral votes to 155. From 1900-1928, Republicans won every Presidential election save for the two won by Woodrow Wilson, and were in charge of Congress for most of those years. Republicans like to speak of the 1896 election, therefore, as a "realignment" election. Karl Rove, in particular, identified it as such, and claimed to model the 2000 election on the McKinley 1896 campaign. Naturally, when Bush "won" in 2000, Rove claimed realignment had occurred. Since then, he has continually blathered about how relalignment is still in place.
Today's New York Times thoroughly rips apart Rove's ridiculous argument:
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Karl Rove, the political mastermind George W. Bush called Boy Genius, was wont to draw an analogy with the election of 1896, in which the Republican William McKinley drubbed William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's election ushered in a 35-year era chiefly characterized by G.O.P. dominance; so, too, Rove argued, would Bush's hasten the progress toward an era of virtual one-party rule (note: a realignment cannot be said to be a realignment, as a matter of political analysis, until the 35-year-era is over. In other words, to have called the realignment a realignment as of 1896 would have been to employ a nonsequitur).
And Rove's bold prediction seemed plausible. Over time (6 years, not 35), the Republicans have increased their margin in Congress and reversed years of Democratic dominance in statehouses and State Legislatures (Repugs have not increased their # of governorships, though). The conservative columnist Fred Barnes declared in 2003 that Republicans had attained a state of dominance last seen in the 1920's, the end of the period McKinley ushered in. Realignment, he wrote, "has reached its entrenchment phase." (Bull. Barnes, as demonstrated above, does not know the definition of realignment. Moreover, by 2006, the ration of Republicans to Democrats in Congress was nowhere NEAR what it was when it was at its highest in the 35-year period).
Or has it? President Bush is now more unpopular than Bill Clinton was at any time in his tenure (not to mention more unpopular than any GOP President during the 35-year period except for Hoover, during whose Presidency the GOP dominance came to an end), while public approval of the G.O.P.-dominated Congress has plummeted to 23 percent, a level last seen in October 1994, the month before the Democrats suffered one of the most humiliating wipeouts in the history of Congressional elections (GOP Congressional approval never reached such a low point during the 35-year period)
Many political analysts now say that the Democrats have a real shot at retaking the House of Representatives and an outside chance of winning the Senate too. A great deal can happen between now and November, not to mention between now and 2008, but the Boy Genius certainly looks a lot less brilliant than he did a few years back. (He, unlike McKinley's strategist, Mark Hanna, also literally pulls EVERY Presidential string. McKinley, contrary to popular belief, was capable of thinking for himself. Hanna, while he ran a fear campaign, too, did not practice the kind of global wedge issue campaign that Rove needs to practice for Rove to retain power. Also, the Republicans of 1896 contained two distinct blocs of voters whose interests almost seemed to coincide: industrial interests and non-complete-religious-nutjob interests. Now, the corporate interests mesh with the Christian right interests. This unholy alliance requires that much more wedgifying - an incongruity which Hanna did not have to face, and thus, did not have to expend that much more fearmongering to maintain).
It is not hard to see why Rove fastened on McKinley as Bush's precursor. McKinley was an amiable governor (but not stupid and not politically immature or maladroit) around whom Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the day, could raise enormous sums of money from industrial and financial circles. But Rove also insisted on a more far-reaching parallel: with the Civil War a fading memory, the Republicans of 1896 could no longer run as the party of the Union and needed to forge a new politics.
McKinley, "the advance agent of prosperity," as he was known, offered himself as a tribune not only of the new business class but also of an emerging industrial society, as against Bryan's appeal to agrarian values and to the dispossessed. McKinley made Republicans the party of the future. And he brought new voting blocs to the Grand Old Party. Rove noted in a 2002 speech that McKinley "attempted deliberately to break with the Gilded Age politics" he had inherited by appealing to "Portuguese fishermen and Slovak coal miners and Serbian ironworkers," all of whom he made a very public point of receiving at his Ohio home in the course of his "front-porch campaign." (Yeah, but those Portuguese fisherman and Slovak coal miners were unenthused by restrictive immigration quotas the Republican party favored throughout the period; they wer also nonplussed about how their relatives still living in Portugal and Serbia were the "recipients" of enormously high tariffs slapped on goods those countries exported to the U.S. due to oppressive Republican tariff policies, policies that helped to disrupt key industries in Central and Eastern European nations and that helped to foster a sense that the U.S. was practicing hativism).
Rove postulated that Bush, like McKinley, had arrived at a moment when the old politics no longer applied and the new had yet to be formed (uh huh. Rove knew that the old politics still did apply but simply wanted to apply a new paint of wedge coat to them to make them look new). By offering himself as a pro-immigrant (key word being "offer" - look at how the House Republicans have admitted that the immigration bill is dead), pro-growth (read: ownership society, defined as a society where 1 % of the population owns 99% of the rest), "compassionate" conservative, he would attract the new voters of the day, including Hispanic immigrants (only 35% of whom voted for Bush, despite what the flawed exit polls revealed) as well as workers in the postindustrial economy (which ones? The -200,000 that got jobs during Bush's first term?), while at the same time mobilizing the party's conservative Christian base.
He would be the candidate of growth and the future while casting his rival, Al Gore, as the embodiment of an exhausted big-government credo. And this strategy worked: in 2000, Bush made (slight) gains among Hispanics (but not with Jews, blacks, or Asians) and carried 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties (mostly all of those counties were tiny red state counties, and their growth was not reflective of industrialization per se). Of course, Gore won the popular vote (because he was able to attract at least as diverse a coalition of voters) and, by some accounts, the election.
And yet since that time, the Democrats have come to look like the party of the underprivileged and the highly educated and scarcely anyone else. (Well, it's not their fault that there are so many underprivileged people now, is it?)
So why doesn't 2006 recall the G.O.P.'s glory years? First of all, McKinley was facing a particularly hapless generation of Democrats (but then again, the Democrats McKinley's immediate predecessors faced weren't exactly unhapless themselves). A long period of deadlock had come to an end in the off-year election of 1894, when the failure of the incumbent Democrats to stem a financial panic led to a colossal electoral rout. In a shambles, the party took a decisive turn to the left in 1896 by choosing the populist Bryan, who ran again in 1900 and 1908. Today's Democrats are much closer to the mainstream, and the realignment has been correspondingly shallower. Over the last decade, as the political analyst Michael Barone observes, the national vote for president and for Congress has divided almost down the middle. Second, while McKinley had the good fortune to arrive at the dawn of a new era, Bush came along three decades after Republicans broke into the Democrats' solid South to establish a new majority. The historic tide may have already been ebbing.
And finally, George W. Bush is no William McKinley. The figure we meet in the biography by Lewis Gould, McKinley's great champion and Rove's teacher at the University of Texas, is a canny political veteran, more pragmatist than dogmatist. McKinley governed from the center the Democrats began to vacate in the Bryan era. The president not only made a show of mingling with workers but also appointed labor leaders to his cabinet and publicly supported the call for an eight-hour day for government employees. And for all his reputation as an imperialist who provoked a war with Spain, McKinley appears to have held out as long as he could against the rabid jingoism of the public and Congress, especially after the sinking of the Maine in Havana's harbor in February 1898. "What is remarkable," Gould concludes after reviewing the evidence, "is how long the president was able to obtain time for the conducting of peaceful diplomacy." (This much is true; McKinley was an actually affable, non-belligerent, somewhat thinking, listening,non-polarizing figure).
George W. Bush is, by contrast, a radical figure, a profoundly self-confident leader willing to stake all on his unshakable inner convictions — which is to say that this president made himself a hostage to fortune in a way that the coldly calculating McKinley never would have done. Thanks in no small part to the supreme self-assurance, the disdain for more cautious points of view, of the president and his inner circle, the administration has run aground on Iraq.
The war in Iraq is the biggest, but not the only, reason for the growing crisis. It is instructive that only one-third of mainline Protestants now say they approve of President Bush's performance (as opposed to one-half two years ago), according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A Congress that spends days arguing over the body of Terry Schiavo or the merits of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage does not feel like the embodiment of the future to more moderate or more secular Republicans. Rove and Bush have driven an already conservative party to the right. "The McKinley party was still plausibly the party of Lincoln," as the historian Sean Wilentz observes. "But Bush and Rove are the culmination of 30 years of realignment in which the Republicans became the party of the South the way the Democrats were in McKinley's day."
John McCain could reinvigorate the party should he succeed Bush, just as the equally magnetic Teddy Roosevelt did when he took office following McKinley's assassination in 1901. But even if that happens, McCain's party is likely to be very different from George W. Bush's. Walter Dean Burnham, the political scientist, defined political realignments as America's "surrogate for revolution." It may be that Karl Rove's revolution was one Americans did not want and have now begun to reject.
***************************************************************************
Let's hope so. After all, McKinley won the Presidency in part due to Bryan's scary crucifixion imagery, however eloquent the language that inspired it. Bush, on the other hand, speaks of crucifixions - of Muslims, of Jews, of non-believers, in metaphorical and literal terms - not in the poetic, but in the vulgar, as a matter of routine course. Such language has caused scare and cheer among the foamies,as did Pat Buchanan's language in the 1992 RNC, and scare (if not the accordingly appropriate voting behavior) to everyone else, but remember: you can foam some of the voters all of the time, or foam all of the voters some of the time, but you can't scare all of them all of the time. Bryan found this out - as he, using doomsday religious rhetoric, lost three out of four elections in a period of twelve years. If I were Rove, THAT would be lesson from 1896 to be learned. How wonderful he hasn't learned it yet. Six years left for him to do so, and then,.... crucifixion time!
But then came 1896. At the Democratic convention in Chicago (back then, conventions were held to actually DECIDE who was to be the nominee, as opposed to coronate a pre-selected one), no one knew who was to be the nominee when the convention began. A young, silver (no, not brown)-tongued orator (and religious zealot) named William Jennings Bryan was one of the last potential nominees to speak. He enthralled the audience with perhaps the most famous line ever uttered at a political convention.
A hot issue in 1896 was whether to allow coinage of silver such that 16 pieces of a certain weight of silver would be the monetary equivalent of one piece of a pre-defined weight of gold. The Republicans - then the party of the rich as well, hated this idea, viewing silver as "funny money" whose coinage would lead to inflation and to other countries' viewing the dollar with suspicion (back then, we were on the gold standard; the dollar was backed by gold in case the dollar went belly-up). Democrats, however, felt that a supply of silver entering the market would provide economic relief to agrarian and other lower-income interests, and that such silver would give them "a currency of their own" to use as a bargaining tool. Republicans in the 1896 election, including the Republican nominee, William McKinley, were called "Goldbugs," while Democrats like Bryan were called "silverites."
The famous line: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns! You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" The crowd went wild. Bryan instantly became the Democratic nominee.
The Bryan-McKinley contest is now viewed as the first modern Presidential election. Firstly, because Bryan, unlike any other candidate before him, traveled throughout the country giving stump speeches. Secondly, because McKinley, while still conducing a traditional "front porch" campaign (in which visitors would come to HIM), spent an ungodly sum of money essentially running a smear campaign against Bryan, threatening that if Bryan won, markets would collapse and industry would turn to ruin. McKinley outspent Bryan by about 10-1, aided by his brilliant fellow Ohioain politican strategist, Mark Hanna. The result: McKinley won a quasi-landslide, 296 electoral votes to 155. From 1900-1928, Republicans won every Presidential election save for the two won by Woodrow Wilson, and were in charge of Congress for most of those years. Republicans like to speak of the 1896 election, therefore, as a "realignment" election. Karl Rove, in particular, identified it as such, and claimed to model the 2000 election on the McKinley 1896 campaign. Naturally, when Bush "won" in 2000, Rove claimed realignment had occurred. Since then, he has continually blathered about how relalignment is still in place.
Today's New York Times thoroughly rips apart Rove's ridiculous argument:
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Karl Rove, the political mastermind George W. Bush called Boy Genius, was wont to draw an analogy with the election of 1896, in which the Republican William McKinley drubbed William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's election ushered in a 35-year era chiefly characterized by G.O.P. dominance; so, too, Rove argued, would Bush's hasten the progress toward an era of virtual one-party rule (note: a realignment cannot be said to be a realignment, as a matter of political analysis, until the 35-year-era is over. In other words, to have called the realignment a realignment as of 1896 would have been to employ a nonsequitur).
And Rove's bold prediction seemed plausible. Over time (6 years, not 35), the Republicans have increased their margin in Congress and reversed years of Democratic dominance in statehouses and State Legislatures (Repugs have not increased their # of governorships, though). The conservative columnist Fred Barnes declared in 2003 that Republicans had attained a state of dominance last seen in the 1920's, the end of the period McKinley ushered in. Realignment, he wrote, "has reached its entrenchment phase." (Bull. Barnes, as demonstrated above, does not know the definition of realignment. Moreover, by 2006, the ration of Republicans to Democrats in Congress was nowhere NEAR what it was when it was at its highest in the 35-year period).
Or has it? President Bush is now more unpopular than Bill Clinton was at any time in his tenure (not to mention more unpopular than any GOP President during the 35-year period except for Hoover, during whose Presidency the GOP dominance came to an end), while public approval of the G.O.P.-dominated Congress has plummeted to 23 percent, a level last seen in October 1994, the month before the Democrats suffered one of the most humiliating wipeouts in the history of Congressional elections (GOP Congressional approval never reached such a low point during the 35-year period)
Many political analysts now say that the Democrats have a real shot at retaking the House of Representatives and an outside chance of winning the Senate too. A great deal can happen between now and November, not to mention between now and 2008, but the Boy Genius certainly looks a lot less brilliant than he did a few years back. (He, unlike McKinley's strategist, Mark Hanna, also literally pulls EVERY Presidential string. McKinley, contrary to popular belief, was capable of thinking for himself. Hanna, while he ran a fear campaign, too, did not practice the kind of global wedge issue campaign that Rove needs to practice for Rove to retain power. Also, the Republicans of 1896 contained two distinct blocs of voters whose interests almost seemed to coincide: industrial interests and non-complete-religious-nutjob interests. Now, the corporate interests mesh with the Christian right interests. This unholy alliance requires that much more wedgifying - an incongruity which Hanna did not have to face, and thus, did not have to expend that much more fearmongering to maintain).
It is not hard to see why Rove fastened on McKinley as Bush's precursor. McKinley was an amiable governor (but not stupid and not politically immature or maladroit) around whom Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the day, could raise enormous sums of money from industrial and financial circles. But Rove also insisted on a more far-reaching parallel: with the Civil War a fading memory, the Republicans of 1896 could no longer run as the party of the Union and needed to forge a new politics.
McKinley, "the advance agent of prosperity," as he was known, offered himself as a tribune not only of the new business class but also of an emerging industrial society, as against Bryan's appeal to agrarian values and to the dispossessed. McKinley made Republicans the party of the future. And he brought new voting blocs to the Grand Old Party. Rove noted in a 2002 speech that McKinley "attempted deliberately to break with the Gilded Age politics" he had inherited by appealing to "Portuguese fishermen and Slovak coal miners and Serbian ironworkers," all of whom he made a very public point of receiving at his Ohio home in the course of his "front-porch campaign." (Yeah, but those Portuguese fisherman and Slovak coal miners were unenthused by restrictive immigration quotas the Republican party favored throughout the period; they wer also nonplussed about how their relatives still living in Portugal and Serbia were the "recipients" of enormously high tariffs slapped on goods those countries exported to the U.S. due to oppressive Republican tariff policies, policies that helped to disrupt key industries in Central and Eastern European nations and that helped to foster a sense that the U.S. was practicing hativism).
Rove postulated that Bush, like McKinley, had arrived at a moment when the old politics no longer applied and the new had yet to be formed (uh huh. Rove knew that the old politics still did apply but simply wanted to apply a new paint of wedge coat to them to make them look new). By offering himself as a pro-immigrant (key word being "offer" - look at how the House Republicans have admitted that the immigration bill is dead), pro-growth (read: ownership society, defined as a society where 1 % of the population owns 99% of the rest), "compassionate" conservative, he would attract the new voters of the day, including Hispanic immigrants (only 35% of whom voted for Bush, despite what the flawed exit polls revealed) as well as workers in the postindustrial economy (which ones? The -200,000 that got jobs during Bush's first term?), while at the same time mobilizing the party's conservative Christian base.
He would be the candidate of growth and the future while casting his rival, Al Gore, as the embodiment of an exhausted big-government credo. And this strategy worked: in 2000, Bush made (slight) gains among Hispanics (but not with Jews, blacks, or Asians) and carried 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties (mostly all of those counties were tiny red state counties, and their growth was not reflective of industrialization per se). Of course, Gore won the popular vote (because he was able to attract at least as diverse a coalition of voters) and, by some accounts, the election.
And yet since that time, the Democrats have come to look like the party of the underprivileged and the highly educated and scarcely anyone else. (Well, it's not their fault that there are so many underprivileged people now, is it?)
So why doesn't 2006 recall the G.O.P.'s glory years? First of all, McKinley was facing a particularly hapless generation of Democrats (but then again, the Democrats McKinley's immediate predecessors faced weren't exactly unhapless themselves). A long period of deadlock had come to an end in the off-year election of 1894, when the failure of the incumbent Democrats to stem a financial panic led to a colossal electoral rout. In a shambles, the party took a decisive turn to the left in 1896 by choosing the populist Bryan, who ran again in 1900 and 1908. Today's Democrats are much closer to the mainstream, and the realignment has been correspondingly shallower. Over the last decade, as the political analyst Michael Barone observes, the national vote for president and for Congress has divided almost down the middle. Second, while McKinley had the good fortune to arrive at the dawn of a new era, Bush came along three decades after Republicans broke into the Democrats' solid South to establish a new majority. The historic tide may have already been ebbing.
And finally, George W. Bush is no William McKinley. The figure we meet in the biography by Lewis Gould, McKinley's great champion and Rove's teacher at the University of Texas, is a canny political veteran, more pragmatist than dogmatist. McKinley governed from the center the Democrats began to vacate in the Bryan era. The president not only made a show of mingling with workers but also appointed labor leaders to his cabinet and publicly supported the call for an eight-hour day for government employees. And for all his reputation as an imperialist who provoked a war with Spain, McKinley appears to have held out as long as he could against the rabid jingoism of the public and Congress, especially after the sinking of the Maine in Havana's harbor in February 1898. "What is remarkable," Gould concludes after reviewing the evidence, "is how long the president was able to obtain time for the conducting of peaceful diplomacy." (This much is true; McKinley was an actually affable, non-belligerent, somewhat thinking, listening,non-polarizing figure).
George W. Bush is, by contrast, a radical figure, a profoundly self-confident leader willing to stake all on his unshakable inner convictions — which is to say that this president made himself a hostage to fortune in a way that the coldly calculating McKinley never would have done. Thanks in no small part to the supreme self-assurance, the disdain for more cautious points of view, of the president and his inner circle, the administration has run aground on Iraq.
The war in Iraq is the biggest, but not the only, reason for the growing crisis. It is instructive that only one-third of mainline Protestants now say they approve of President Bush's performance (as opposed to one-half two years ago), according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A Congress that spends days arguing over the body of Terry Schiavo or the merits of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage does not feel like the embodiment of the future to more moderate or more secular Republicans. Rove and Bush have driven an already conservative party to the right. "The McKinley party was still plausibly the party of Lincoln," as the historian Sean Wilentz observes. "But Bush and Rove are the culmination of 30 years of realignment in which the Republicans became the party of the South the way the Democrats were in McKinley's day."
John McCain could reinvigorate the party should he succeed Bush, just as the equally magnetic Teddy Roosevelt did when he took office following McKinley's assassination in 1901. But even if that happens, McCain's party is likely to be very different from George W. Bush's. Walter Dean Burnham, the political scientist, defined political realignments as America's "surrogate for revolution." It may be that Karl Rove's revolution was one Americans did not want and have now begun to reject.
***************************************************************************
Let's hope so. After all, McKinley won the Presidency in part due to Bryan's scary crucifixion imagery, however eloquent the language that inspired it. Bush, on the other hand, speaks of crucifixions - of Muslims, of Jews, of non-believers, in metaphorical and literal terms - not in the poetic, but in the vulgar, as a matter of routine course. Such language has caused scare and cheer among the foamies,as did Pat Buchanan's language in the 1992 RNC, and scare (if not the accordingly appropriate voting behavior) to everyone else, but remember: you can foam some of the voters all of the time, or foam all of the voters some of the time, but you can't scare all of them all of the time. Bryan found this out - as he, using doomsday religious rhetoric, lost three out of four elections in a period of twelve years. If I were Rove, THAT would be lesson from 1896 to be learned. How wonderful he hasn't learned it yet. Six years left for him to do so, and then,.... crucifixion time!
posted by EnterCenter at 10:22 AM
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