The Third Hand A Historical Perspective
“I’d like to find a one-handed economist.”
- Harry Truman
vol. 2
The Swamps of South Carolina; the Slots of Nevada
February 29, 2016
On this strange Leap Day that comes around every four years
during presidential primary season, I look back on the strangest primary season
I have ever witnessed and one of the strangest weeks I have ever spent in
Washington. I was here for the
government shut-down in the fall of 2013.
That was certainly strange enough.
There was another shut-down during the Clinton-Gingrich years, which I
witnessed from a distance. I lived
through, as a teen-ager, what many historians call America’s annus horribilus, 1968, when two great
Americans were assassinated and the nation engaged in vitriolic debate about
the Vietnam War.
This past week we onlookers beheld a party full of people
who finally looked up from their drinks and canapés to see that that boorish
character who crashed the party was still there. They had hoped that people would simply
ignore him, he would tire of talking to himself and leave, but we now see that
people have assembled chairs around him and appear to be really listening.
What? We thought this
was the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and
Reagan. The conservative, respectable
Republican Party. These presidents
inspired plenty of opposition in their day, surely, but they maintained their
dignity, generally earned the respect of their opponents and respected them in
turn. The party certainly changed over
the years and we cannot expect the Grand Old Party be the same as it was 100 or
even fifty years ago. And some fifty
years ago it went through a similar fracas.
T. H. White, in The Making of the President 1964, wrote
about this last time the Republican Party tore itself apart. As it became clear that Senator Barry
Goldwater was on his way to being nominated, leading Republicans pleaded with former
President Eisenhower to issue some sort of statement, an endorsement of
Governor Rockefeller, perhaps, anything that might slow down the rush to
Goldwater. Ike, characteristically,
would not act unless he saw a clear path to success. That is how he acted throughout his career
and it worked very well for him. He was
a very successful president, perhaps even a great one, because he chose his
battles very carefully. Thus T. H. White
wrote about him and his party:
“Eisenhower, for
Republicans, is like the Holy Ark that the ancient Israelites carried into
battle against the Philistines.
Somewhere deep inside the mystery of Eisenhower lies that which most
Republicans think their party is about.”
It is another measure of
how our politics has changed that we must now substitute Reagan for Eisenhower
as that Holy Ark; and even Reagan is quickly fading into history beyond the
recall of living memory. People under
the age of forty today have at best just dim childhood memories of this last
Republican president who maintained his popularity within the party and much of
the electorate throughout his tenure in office.
What is the Republican Party
about in the late winter and early spring of 2016? The question hangs in the balance. A strange tilt-o-whirl, Alice-in-Wonderland
atmosphere pervades this primary season, as if a massive earthquake were going
on – the walls are shaking, the furniture is moving - without end in
sight.
What worries me most is
the fate of the Presidency itself. A
reality television star, given to boorish outbursts and dogged by allegations
of impropriety and financial malfeasance, appears to be on track to win the
Republican nomination. The way things
are heading, “American Idol” may well be the best name for the occupant of this
office. What would Isaiah or Jeremiah
make of that?
One would think that the
Republican establishment should be able to find a suitable candidate to stop
the stampede to Trump, but not only does there not appear to be such a candidate,
there does not appear to be such an establishment either. There are two former Republican Presidents,
both named Bush, either of whom, in normal years, might be called upon to speak
some words of wisdom and encouragement to party stalwarts. Not this year.
The Democrats, though
divided, are in slightly better shape. They
like both of their presidential retirees and, generally, nominees. On the culture front – everything having to
do with sex, gender and diversity - they seem to be winning and if one were to
bet money, one would bet on the White House remaining in the hands of the
Democrats.
But not much else. The House will almost certainly remain
Republican. The Republicans may well
retain control of the Senate. Senate Republican
leaders appear to have no worries about a popular reaction against their
refusal to even consider a nominee to the Supreme Court – or to consider
closing Guantanamo either - indicating a confident feel for the pulse of their
voters..
How can this be?
Is it that Trump is out
and out saying the mean-spirited things that Republican leaders have merely
been implying? Are millions of Americans
so fed up with political correctness that they just revel in someone who flouts
these conventions? Have the two parties
drifted so far apart and the culture become so vulgarized that Donald Trump can
appear to occupy the middle ground as some kind of common-sense everyman? Is this what our gadget and
entertainment-loving culture has created?
I stand by last week’s
prediction that Donald Trump would lose a general election to Hillary Clinton
or Bernie Sanders by a wide margin. Too
few Democrats will vote for Trump and too many Republicans will not vote for him. There is certainly time for another candidate
to win the Republican nomination. We still
only have a few delegates allocated from four rather small, unrepresentative
states, after all. But no remaining
candidate has the star personality power of the New York businessman.
Will personality and an
uncanny finger on the pulse of this strange new electorate be enough? We may know as soon as tomorrow.
