by Bill Fawcett
12
PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
“Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against.”
W. C. Fields
The first presidential elections were very gentlemanly compared to today’s mud-slinging fiascos. But chaotic politics and backroom agreements are hardly a new thing. The election of 1824 was a prime example of the republic still finding itself and the politics this spawned. The electors in the Electoral College were much more independent back then. In fact, the original intention was to see the electors, many of whom were appointed not elected, use their collective wisdom to select the best person to become president. There were, as you can see, a few of the Founding Fathers whose faith in general elections and the masses was less than total. But this led to the situation in 1824 where no one had even close to a majority and four men were striving to be elected to the office, regardless of the fact that Andrew Jackson had won the popular vote. Finally the election was, as per procedure, thrown to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay had lost badly in the voting, but was very influential in the Congress. He could no longer present himself as a viable candidate, but was in a position to choose who would win. He chose John Quincy Adams over the voters’ choice of Andrew Jackson. In return, Henry Clay was appointed secretary of state, the number two executive office at that time. The uproar this caused basically crippled the J. Q. Adams presidency and not one of his major initiatives was passed. His was the first administration to be crippled by politics, though hardly the last.
A DUBIOUS TRADITION
Feeling he had been cheated out of being president in 1824, Andrew Jackson campaigned tirelessly in 1828. He was aided by a number of factors. The most important was the popular support he got for being the nation’s best-known war hero and leader. But John Quincy Adams, running for a second term, was also a great help—to Jackson. Adams was a bit of an elitist who disliked campaigning, and it showed. He was also described as being arrogant and haughty, and had an immense dislike for casual conversation. When his negative attitude was combined with the failure his battle with Congress made of his first term, John Quincy Adams became only the second president in history to be defeated in his bid for reelection. Even more painful: his father, John Adams, was the first. This makes for a rather dubious family tradition.
“P” AND THAT RHYMES WITH POOL
John Quincy Adams was an elitist and hard to deal with, but he was scrupulously honest and kept accurate and highly-detailed records of everything. This served him very badly when he listed a billiards table as one of his personal purchases for use in the White House. While he did not use any government money for the purchase, the supporters of Andrew Jackson made a tremendous stink about the depravity of having a gaming table in the executive mansion.
THE WHAT PARTY?
When Andrew Jackson became president, he was a populist, the people’s choice. His platform was to clean up Washington. He sounded then just like all the candidates now, including diatribes on elitists (read, “inside the Beltway”) and influence peddlers (read, “special interests”). And the result was just about the same—nothing. All he did was to fire those who had supported his opponent, former President J. Q. Adams, with his own patronage army. He then went on to take over the party established by Thomas Jefferson, which was then known as the Republican Party. But now that he was running it, the party got a new name to reflect his populist support, and the Republican Party became the Democratic Party. Those opposing Jackson found that they needed an organization, too. After all, he had just trounced them at the polls—and formed the Whig Party. So the Republicans became the Democrats who were opposed by the Whigs, who thirty years later ceded their role as the opposition to the new party whose candidate was Abraham Lincoln. Since the name was available, this new party called itself the Republican Party.
CONVENTIONAL CHOICE
The 1852, the Democratic National convention had a problem. Due to the split in its members between pro-and anti-slavery delegates, it was unable to select a candidate. After thirty-four ballots, everyone was ready to find someone, anyone, who could represent the party. By this point, it is safe to assume that not only exhaustion and embarrassment were at play. The cost of attending the greatly-extended convention was also adding up. So the Democrats settled on an unknown party loyalist who had two big advantages. He was well thought of, which meant no one objected to him, and he was a “Dogface.” Dogfaces were Northern politicians with pro-slavery and Southern attitudes, and Franklin Pierce was one. Part of being a Dogface was the tradition (like Andrew Jackson) of states’ rights. This policy maintained that the federal government should play a very narrow role in everything, and anything not stated as being a federal responsibility in the Constitution should be left to each state. This policy worked well for those states who wanted to maintain slavery. So in 1852, Franklin Pierce was elected president with little going for him, and an attitude that the government he led should do as little as possible. The presidency of Franklin Pierce proved such a disaster that when he strove to get the Democrats to nominate him for a second term, that party chose as a motto “Anybody but Pierce.” He dropped out of the race.
CLOSE CALL
While his incompetent presidency likely contributed to starting the Civil War, former President Franklin Pierce maintained his states’ rights and Southern sympathies. This angered those who bothered to remember the undistinguished president and his lackluster single term in office. Feelings were very high and hot after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Pierce made the mistake of not displaying an American flag during the period of mourning, something nearly every home in the North did. Seeing this, a mob formed, under the assumption that the insult to the memory of Lincoln, with whom Pierce differed on about every subject, was intentional. Only by grabbing a flag and then talking very quickly was the former president able to preserve health and home.
BLAME GAME
Politicians are always quick to assign blame. Slower, but more critical, are historians. Among the lowest, if not the lowest, rated by virtually all presidential scholars is James Buchanan. The real sin for which such a low rating comes is not something the fifteenth president did but rather what he didn’t do. The nation was being torn apart politically by the slavery and states’ rights issues. Several opportunities arose where a decisive leader might have acted to defuse the conflict. Rather than provide leadership, Buchanan simply did nothing. Or rather what little he attempted, such as an abortive attempt for a constitution for Kansas, simply made things worse. Because of this incompetence and inaction, the nation sank deeper into antipathy and discord. His failures encouraged the rise of the relatively new anti-slavery party known as the Republicans. The Republican rhetoric and strength in the Northern states meant that the Southern states viewed a Republican election success as a threat to their society and economy. By the time the Republican Abraham Lincoln took office, there was no room for compromise left and the Southern states began to secede. The inaction and feeble leadership of James Buchanan, in a time when strong and courageous leadership was needed, led to the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
DEFINITION
“What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”—Abraham Lincoln
COMPARED TO WHO?
John Lennon was not the first person to claim he was comparable to Jesus Christ himself. When Andrew Johnson, later the first president to be impeached, was responding to hecklers, he compared himself to Christ. He then went on to say that Lincoln may have been struck down by a deity who wanted him to become president. By 1868, no one even considered his running for reelection.
BETRAYAL
Chester A. Arthur became president after Garfield died from being shot and the botched treatments that followed. He had been given the vice presidency as a reward for his successful use of dubious ways of raising a very great amount of funds for the Republican Party and its candidates. This process of selling positions, threats
, and using the power of the government to cajole money for those in power was known as the “spoils system.” He was the crony of some of the most notorious politicians in New York history. Beyond his talent at raising money using any means necessary, there wasn’t much to distinguish Arthur from hundreds of other political hacks. But after he became president, Chester A. Arthur had some sort of transformation. He suddenly became the chief proponent and enforcer of public honesty. Since he had been perhaps the worst and most knowledgeable of the offenders he now opposed, this made the twenty-first resident very effective at cleaning up a corrupt political system. Under his administration the Pendleton Act was passed, whose reforms made it impossible for the spoils system, and all of the many money raising techniques Arthur himself perfected, to continue.
A final note: it would be nice to say that the nation appreciated President Arthur’s efforts and made him a hero who was reelected in a landslide. The reality was that even if he had handicapped their money-raising and other crooked practices, the party bosses were still in control of the Republican Party apparatus. Those bosses, now poorer but wiser, dropped their newly found reformer almost before the next nominating convention began.
PRECEDENT
Before recent times, three presidents were elected with less than a majority of the popular vote. These were:
1825
Andrew Jackson
153,544
John Q. Adams
108, 740
winner by vote of the House of Representatives
1877
Rutherford B. Hayes
4,036,298
voted in by a special commission
Samuel Tilden
4,300,590
1889
Grover Cleveland
5,540,309
Benjamin Harrison
5,439,853
won more electoral votes
13
LEFT AND RIGHT…
OR, WHEN REPUBLICANS DO DEMOCRATIC THINGS AND VICE VERSA
By Brian M. Thomsen
“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
In his 2004 book, The Great Game of Politics, Dick Stoken mapped the presidential political cycle of history as a back-and-forth pendulum swing.
In each case a movement in one direction dictates a resultant and reactive movement in the other direction and over the course of the history of our great democracy these swings have grown wider and wider.
Initially, the Federalist swing to the right (John Adams being elected after Washington) was answered by the reactive leftward Jeffersonian swing. And over time each swing and the resultant period of left or right philosophy in power has increased, the two most prominent swings of the twentieth century being the FDR “New Deal” answer to the conservative pro-business Harding-Coolidge “New Era,” and the Ronald Reagan-led “New Economy” that was an answer to the attitudes and practices of the “New Deal.”
An oversimplified explication of this is that, when one party overreaches, there is citizen dissatisfaction that leads to a move toward supremacy of the opposite party—and in most cases these moves are led by a Democrat on the left and a Republican on the right.
Ergo, Democrats are on the left and Republicans are on the right.
Simple.
No, not really—and not so fast with that distinction.
Consider the following anomalies:
The Democratic Party is sometimes referred to as the party of Thomas Jefferson. Now, when you think of the Democratic Party, you tend to think of sweeping national programs that override the views of local governments, which has resulted in such legislative actions as those pertaining to civil rights, or legal decisions such as Roe vs. Wade. Yet when you look at Jefferson’s platform, one must immediately realize that it was quite the opposite, as it was pro states’ rights, anti national bank, and against tariffs/taxes imposed at the federal level.
Just as Jefferson is considered to be the initiating icon of the modern Democratic Party, Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president, has taken the mantle of patriarch of the modern Republican Party or, more precisely, Federalists 2.0.
So isn’t it ironic that Lincoln was the first president to shift from strict constitutional constructionism to a more, dare I say “liberal” approach? Unlike his Federalist forefathers, Lincoln in his rhetoric and reasoning shifted the focus of American values away from the set-in-stone legalisms of the Constitution and back to the platitudes of the first American document, the Declaration of Independence. He claimed it provided the nation with the foundation of American political values or what he more precisely referred to as the “sheet anchor” of republicanism (freedom and liberty for all, at least metaphorically).
And what else is this Federalist 2.0 credited with?
Initiating the first United States income tax, of course—something staunch Republican talking heads such as anti-tax maven and ultra-conservative activist Grover Norquist always leave out in their diatribes about reducing taxes so that we can shrink the government to a size that would enable us to drown it in a bathtub.
Let’s look at another issue on the Democratic side.
In a recent debate of the candidates running for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008, a questioner asked the gentlemen at hand, “Who believes in evolution?”
Such a question as this would have no real significance in the Democratic Party, but in recent years the schism over faith vs. science has widened, particularly among the evangelical wings of the Republican Party.
So the question is, which party has nominated the strongest opponent to the theory of evolution as their party’s nominee?
No question about it.
The Democrats.
Huh?
Yup…he never won, but they nominated him three times in 1896, 1900, and 1908. His name was William Jennings Bryan, and nowadays he is mostly remembered as being Clarence Darrow’s opposing counsel in the so-called “Scopes/Monkey Trial” that was the basis for the popular play Inherit the Wind. To date, no Republican has been a stauncher anti-evolution advocate than Bryan.
Conversely, what president said the following?
“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.”
Separation of church and state.
No federal funds for religious schools.
Obviously a Democrat.
Uh…no.
That was Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth president of the United States, who was a Republican.
What about other Republicans who have embraced supposed Democratic issues?
Well, let’s see…how about the environment?
Has there been a more seminally Democratic issue, even before Al Gore’s Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth? Whether it be the allocation of federal land for national parks or preserves, or the imposition of limits on industry in their selfish exploitation of such resources, Democrats have always led on this issue.
And who inaugurated this movement?
None other than Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican who not only championed the environment, but also opposed the moneyed interest of big business on a variety of issues that have now become planks in the platform of the Democratic Party.
But of course TR was not the first president to express his gratitude for the wonders of nature through the exercising of his presidential powers.
In 1891, the twenty-third president, through an executive order, set aside a tract of land in Wyoming as the nation’s first forest reservation, the first unit in what eventually became the National Forest system.
That President was Benjamin Harrison.
You guessed it, another Republican.
Indeed, nowadays big business rather than big nature has become more synonymous with the Republican Party, with many opponents pointing out the overwhelming cozi
ness between money men and Republican politicians who make them rich through huge defense contracts, resulting in a shadow government run by the so-called “Military-Industrial Complex” that trumps our democracy.
And who was the first president to warn the American people against the insidious “Military-Industrial Complex”? None other than Dwight David Eisenhower, a former military man and a Republican in good standing.
And who can forget the twenty-second president, who took a hard line on governmental hardship handouts, who maintained that “federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character” and as a result vetoed aid bills for drought-beset farmers and economically and physically challenged veterans. Indeed 22 exercised the veto pen more than any of his predecessors as a means to cut federal government handouts.
And what about the twenty-fourth president, who sent in federal troops to union bust and strike break the Eugene Debbs-led Pullman Strike that threatened to obstruct the nation’s railways?
Both 22 and 24 sound awfully conservative and very Republican.
But the answer is both, though that is probably misleading, as 22 and 24 are the same man. Indeed the only person ever to serve two nonconsecutive terms as president.
That man was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat.
Herewith some more food for thought:
President number six, John Quincy Adams, son of president number two, John Adams, an ardent conservative in the Federalist vein.
Nowadays when we think of “Federalists” we think of strict constitutional constructionists, supporters of little government and even littler taxes.
So the question arises what was “Q” known for domestically (as opposed to internationally, since his five predecessors seemed more concerned with extra-American matters like defense, trade, and land acquisition)?