Pat Bagley on how far we've fallen in four decades.
There was a time when political leaders thought about their positions on various issues. They certainly weren't immune to the concept of party loyalty, but neither were they slaves to it. We could justifiably point to Congress and say we preferred our system to Parliamentary democracy, where the party with the most seats got its way in everything. In our system, the President had to make a convincing argument, because it wasn't as simple as counting how many party members were in each house.
George Romney was one of a number of prominent, thoughtful politicians whose party labels mattered but who were not fundamentally defined by those labels: George Romney, Scoop Jackson, Wayne Morse, Birch Bayh, Nelson Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, Howard Baker.
(Fun for the old folks: Which of those were Democrats and which were Republicans? Answers below!)
Even an "extremist" like Barry Goldwater would cross the aisle, if only to maintain his own rigid principles when they conflicted with party positions.
I put the word in quotation marks because it seems so quaint, today, to have thought of him in such a way. And he was an admitted extremist at the time, famous for saying, in his 1964 acceptance speech for the GOP presidential nomination, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
The idea of being a hard-liner, I think, meant something else in those days. At least, it meant something else to voters, who, despite all the cheering that had greeted that now-famous quote, handed Goldwater his head in a landslide defeat.
I don't imagine anyone pictured LBJ as a deep thinker, but a policy built on dogmatism apparently was, in those days, considered more frightening than it was considered a sign of character.
Four years later, George Romney was a front-runner for the nomination, until, speaking of a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, instead of saying, "Boy, did the generals and others we met there try to spin me!" (The term didn't exist yet), said that he had been "brainwashed." The press lept on the term and Romney's run was over.
Which meant we never got to argue over the fact that he had been born to American citizens living in Mexico.
For that matter, we also missed the chance to see George Romney, who opposed the war, running against Robert Kennedy, who also opposed the war.
Maybe Humphrey/Nixon was the start of the slide.
(Answers: George Romney - R, Scoop Jackson - D, Wayne Morse - D, Birch Bayh -D, Nelson Rockefeller - R, Everett Dirksen - R, Howard Baker - R.)
Well, 1968 saw the genesis of the Southern strategy, plus Agnew bashing the liberal elites, so one could certainly draw a credible line from Nixon to what we have today.
Or this may just be a knee-jerk reaction. Hard to be sure.
"Hound that evil monster to the grave! And then throw stones at his statue!" - Randy Cohen
Posted by: Mark Jackson | 06/06/2011 at 10:56 PM