Why This Is So! (continued II)

In my last analysis of why this is so I concluded with the comment, “To me, Carter’s greatest fault was that he was a conservative in many ways and started the trend to deregulate, making it fashionable; thereby laying the groundwork for the Republican massive assault on regulations in the years to come.” But Carter had other faults, which had not so much to do with his effectiveness as President, but rather with the image he projected. 

Carter image of the Presidency was the opposite of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the Imperial Presidency or as Camelot during the Kennedy administration. Carter saw himself as a man of the people. His style was to emphasize modesty rather than grandiosity. He walked to his inauguration. He wore cardigan sweaters. He never understood that deep down the American people want their President to have the trappings of Monarchy. They feel that to the extent that the image of the President is diminished the image of the country is diminished.

At the same time Carter inherited from the Nixon/Ford administration the malaise not only of Watergate but the stagflation that was gripping the country. Carter did not have the imagination to rouse the country, to present imaginative programs ala the New Deal or the Fair Deal or even of the tax cuts championed by Jack Kennedy. Instead he spoke of the need to come to grips with diminishing expectations, something the public was not about to accept.
 
Above all Carter wanted his legacy to be the spread of human rights throughout the world, at a time when the Cold War often required us to take allies where we could find them, and where history handed him irrevocable commitments. The Shah of Iran who had been placed on his throne by the Eisenhower administration in an overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadeg, had no support in his country and had been ruling it as a viscous tyrant (while trying to modernize it, to be sure) was now dying of cancer and appealed to Carter for asylum and medical treatment in the United States. Carter found himself unable to turn his back on him both for humanitarian reasons and because of the U.S. commitment which had been made to him as an ally. Carter correctly feared that an abandonment of this man in the hour of his need would send the wrong signal to our allies. He therefore gave him asylum in the U.S. as his regime was in the process of being over thrown by the Ayatollah. But this only fueled the enmity of the Iranians toward the U.S. and soon the Embassy was overrun and hostages taken. There was nothing Carter could do other than what he did do, but the failure of the military to carry out a rescue plan was turned into Carter’s failure.

Nevertheless, as the election against Reagan approached Carter held a large lead in the polls because Reagan was perceived as an extremist who the public was wary. Reagan’s sunny personality and his slogan, “Its morning in America” reassured a wary public. As Election Day approached the polls narrowed and it became apparent that the hostages held the key to who would win the election. Carter hoped and Reagan feared a release of the hostages before the election, which meant that the next President would in effect be chosen by the Ayatollah in Iran. Either, that radical government felt that the election of Reagan would serve its interests, or as has been rumored (though never proven) Reagan cut a deal with Teheran that if they would keep the hostages till after the election he would supply them with arms, (which in fact he did in what came to be known as the Iran/Contra scandal.

Next time, how Reagan takes the Republican Party and the country to the right and makes this respectable, as Democrats have no answer and as the Union movement crumbles.

Why This Is So! (continued)

In my last two commentaries I first explained, why I believe that things are worse than they seem and then set forth my views as to why is so. 

Now I wish to continue my comments on why this so. All these problems were still manageable and in the election of 1968 Johnson won a landslide victory over the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. This was a cataclysmic event not so much because of the overwhelming victory by Johnson but because it marked the transformation of the Republican party from an East Coast dominated conservative party to a radical Libertarian party which in its avowed radicalism tended to frighten voters and by comparison made Johnson into the peace candidate. But events and decisions by Johnson and other Democrats worked against Democratic strengths. First by the time the election of 1972 rolled around the Vietnam War had become increasingly unpopular. As a result Johnson, after his humiliation by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, withdrew and Hubert Humphrey had the nomination within his grasp. There is every indication that Humphrey would have run as a peace candidate, but Johnson feeling that this would amount to a repudiation of his stewardship threatened to withdraw his support of Humphrey, which would have doomed his candidacy. As a result, Humphrey ended up antagonizing the peace movement, which resulted in huge peace demonstrations in Chicago. Chicago’s Democratic Mayor, Richard Daley, was not going to stand for the demonstrations and called out the riot police who were extremely hostile to the demonstrators, resulting in what many considered a police riot. The images in the media conveyed demonstrators, many of whom were rioting, as well as the brutality of the police against peaceful demonstrators, thoroughly damaging the Democrats in general, and Humphrey in particular. I voted for Humphrey, but at the time wrote an open letter to Humphrey, which was neither published nor responded to. 

The result was that Humphrey lost to Nixon (who had claimed that he had a secret plan to end the war) but who prolonged the war and caused untold casualties to American troops as well as Vietnam and Cambodian civilians. (Anyone who saw the movie “The Killing Fields” is well acquainted with the horrors that resulted. But despite this and even though Watergate was already brewing, Nixon won the next election beating McGovern the committed peace candidate by a landslide and Nixon, instead of being remembered as the man who prolonged the war and finally lost it, is remembered by many as the man who ended it.

Watergate ended Nixon’s career, but not the Southern strategy, and allowed him to pick his own successor, the Nixon loyalist Gerald Ford. Carter beat Ford, but not because Democrats were in the ascendancy or because Carter was a strong candidate, but because the smell of Watergate was still too strong in the nostrils of the electorate.

Carter is often dismissed as a failure because, it is asserted, he was too focused on details but there is little to support this other then the press’s penchant for caricaturing public figures, just as they caricatured Ford as not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

To me, Carter’s greatest fault was that he was a conservative in many ways and started the trend to deregulate making it fashionable; thereby laying the groundwork for the Republican massive assault on regulations in the years to come.

Why This Is So!

In my last column, entitled, “Things are worse than they seem,” I set forth my rather pessimistic views as to the state of the Democratic Party, (not Democrat Party) (more on this in a later essay) and the state of the progressive movement in general. I did not mention in that article two other disturbing factors which bear mention, namely that the percentage of the Latino and over 65 vote for Kerry, both declined from the percentages of the previous four years. I concluded my article with the promise that in my next analysis I will discuss why I think this is so and in a third installment I will discuss what I believe must be done to reverse the trend.

So here is why I think this is so! I believe that the seeds for demise of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, which has its roots in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt early in the twentieth century, were sown during the Administration of Lyndon Johnson and in the Civil Rights movement. Until then the Democratic Party held its dominance based on a coalition of what used to be the Confederacy whose representatives, for the most part, were segregationists and anti-union factions, and the industrial states centered on the East and West coasts and around the Great Lakes. Franklin Roosevelt, held this coalition together by never touching what he saw as the third rail of politics, namely the plight of African-American’s in the South. 

Truman endangered this coalition to some extent, when he desegregated the military, but the South, which associated the Republican Party, with Lincoln and emancipation, could not bring itself to even consider any association with this old enemy. Johnson, who but for Vietnam, might have gone down in history as the greatest of twentieth century Presidents, totally shattered this image by pushing through a recalcitrant Congress the greatest change in racial relations since the Emancipation Proclamation. What Johnson did may in fact have done more to free the Black man than Lincoln because Lincoln legacy left the Black man in something equivalent to slavery, known as “share cropping.” 

While the South was not immediately lost to the Democrats (voting habits die hard) the South gradually fell away from the Democratic party and when Nixon took advantage of this with his “Southern strategy” the die was cast, particularly when it became apparent that the party of Lincoln was now embracing the most rabid of the segregationists and welcoming them into its bosom. Strum Thurmond, who ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket was only the most egregious of these. Not only was the South lost, but since then not a single Democratic candidate for president ever received a majority of the White, or more accurately, the Caucasian vote. 

Johnson did more than this. He enacted the programs of the Great Society, which with their great appeal to the poor and most of the middle class had the potential to overcome the loss of the segregationist vote. Johnson led a revolution, which in its scope dwarfed the achievements of the New Deal. Under his leadership, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, Public Housing, and Aid to Dependent Children, to mention only the most important of his “War on Poverty.” Unfortunately, The Vietnam war not only tarnished his and the Democratic parties legacy but forced an underfunding of many of his programs, thus making many of them ineffective.