Past Columns

So Sayeth Santayana

The presidential race this year looks a lot like the one in 1960. And 1968. And 1976. And 1980. And 1828.

By Michael Miner

February 21, 2008

A black man and a white woman are in a heated race for the Democratic presidential nomination, with the winner favored to take all the marbles in November. Your average civic-minded American is probably thinking, “Wow, this has never happened before.” You might be saying that yourself. But you’d be wrong.

The past, you see, is a lot like the Bible. Whatever you need to make an argument you’ll find there, if you know where to look. And whenever the times we live in seem a bit unusual, our wisest pundits let us know we’ve passed this way before. They’re hooked on Santayana: nothing is new, the past has lessons for us all, and we either heed them or pay the price. (George Santayana, you may recall, is responsible for the oft-butchered aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”)

When these pundits first roused themselves to take the measure of this election, the referent of choice was 1960. It was so inviting to contemplate Barack Obama as the JFK of our time—young, vital, intelligent, able to tap a national discontent without pandering. JFK was Catholic; Obama’s black. JFK had few Senate accomplishments to point to; so has Obama. But their backstories were dramatic: JFK the rich but sickly scion turned heroic PT boat skipper, Obama the biracial Harvard Law Review president turned community organizer. As it was with Kennedy so it would be with Obama—if he won, America would like itself better in the morning.

But then 1968 started giving 1960 a run for its money. When Obama was late for a rally at Omaha’s overflowing Civic Auditorium the other day, the governor of neighboring Iowa stepped in to say a few words. “Not since John Kennedy has a politician had the ability to inspire Americans regardless of who they are or where they come from,” said Governor Chet Culver. But when Obama was finally introduced, Nebraska’s Democratic senator, Ben Nelson, harked back to the giddy day when Robert Kennedy campaigned for the nomination in Omaha. And at the Web site beyondchron.org there was a reference to this year’s Democratic primaries as the “most exciting contest since 1968.”

Sure, that’s shallow stuff. But Frank Rich of the New York Times lingered on the comparison, imagining a “race-tinged brawl” at this summer’s Democratic convention, a replay of the “Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party.” And Michael Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, dug in even deeper: whichever Kennedy Obama more closely resembles, he wrote in an essay in the Times, “the mood of the country today is clearly more than a little like the mood of America in 1968.”

Elaborating, Oreskes quoted something that Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had written as 1968 ended: “Of course, the war cannot bear responsibility for all our other ills. It has contributed to them by draining off resources and energies and, most of all, by blunting our sense of moral purpose. But to a large extent it has only catalyzed an awareness of more profound problems.”

Oreskes commented, “The national unhappiness was rooted in deep societal alienation, Mr. Goodwin argued, brought on by everything from suburbanization to the dawn of the computer age. The sources are different today. But alienation again fuels frustration and disenchantment. Government seems distant and ineffective to many voters. Even a government as powerful as America’s seems inadequate to crucial challenges—from the physical threat of terrorism to the economic wrenching of globalization. The political world, to many, seems out of joint.”

Oreskes was doing a serious Santayanan number. He was looking back at 1968 because he believed that if we can see it clearly now, from a distance of 40 years, this year will come into focus as well.

On February 13 the Tribune carried an editorial, “Democracy and Democrats,” that raised the possibility of Obama edging out Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries yet losing the nomination. The Tribune imagined the Clintons, better connected to the party apparatus, cornering the 796 superdelegates, who tend to be party insiders. “Could happen,” said the editorial, pointing to 2000, when Al Gore got most of the votes “but by the rules of the game—the role of the Electoral College, and the U.S. Supreme Court decision that halted a constitutionally unfair Florida recount—Bush won the presidency.”

(If I were writing a different column I’d pause here to ponder the phrase “constitutionally unfair.” If the Tribune believes the recount was unconstitutional it should say so. Otherwise it should elaborate on the doctrine that makes it OK for the Supreme Court to step in whenever something’s going on that’s constitutional but just doesn’t sit right.)

My own favorite historical referent is another one altogether. I see smug Democrats telling themselves that nothing but racism and sexism stands between them and the White House—and if those malign forces are strong enough to decide the day, well, what’s a righteous party to do? I offer for their consideration 1976. A discredited president wasn’t simply leaving office—he’d already been tossed out on his ear. It was the Democrats’ race to lose, and the party united behind a soft-spoken, vigorous, brainy candidate no one had heard of four years earlier. Jimmy Carter had never served in Washington; he’d been the governor of Georgia only four years. But no one held his inexperience against him. A man of the New South, he was a symbol of change and redemption.

But just as neither Obama nor Clinton will be running against Bush, Carter wasn’t running against Nixon. He ran against Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, a likable lug who was as different from Nixon as another Republican could be. Ford wore well. He got us out of Vietnam, he put an able and untroubling John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, and whenever he fell down he picked himself up. As the campaign wore on, people began asking themselves, “Well, why not Ford?”

Jimmy Carter, former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, will presumably be remembered as an American giant. But Carter’s not an especially likable guy. As the 1976 campaign heated up and voters got more familiar with him, they cooled off.

“He has flaws and tics. Often tired, some­times crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner. A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard.”

This passage, which describes Jimmy Carter pretty well, right down to the self-regard, was Andrew Sullivan’s description of Obama in an essay in last December’s Atlantic. Even so, Sullivan argued for Obama’s election because he’s “transformational.” The problem Obama—or Clinton—is apt to run into if and when the time comes to campaign against and debate John McCain is that McCain, at least in a public forum, is easy to like. The Democrats might wind up praying for ageism to save their bacon. Ford closed fast and Carter beat him by the skin of his teeth.

I’m not sure the word “transformational” was around to be applied to Carter when he ran, but the general theory of his candidacy was that the nation hungered for transformation and he was the man to provide it. When he got into office it turned out that what the nation hungered for was cheaper gas, less inflation, and, in the last year of his presidency, the return of our hostages from Iran. Carter wasn’t much help with any of this.

So Democratic strategists should take a close look at 1976. And while they’re in the vicinity, they might want to glance at 1980 too. That was the year Teddy Kennedy challenged Carter for the nomination, couldn’t tell CBS interviewer Roger Mudd exactly why he was running, and got thumped in the early going—in the “pivotal primaries and caucuses [that] coincided with the phase of the Iranian crisis during which Jimmy Carter’s popularity was artificially high,” as I wrote then in the Reader. But by late summer, after the fiasco of the Iranian rescue mission, Carter’s popularity had fallen off so much there was actually a movement within the party for an “open” convention—one in which the elected delegates would be free to vote for whomever they pleased. On the eve of the Democratic convention in New York, I wrote, “Polls told us that President Carter had lost the confidence of the public as a whole and even of his own party—meaning those Democrats who elected the Carter delegates who came to New York to do their bidding.”

But the open-convention movement failed. Kennedy delivered the stem-winder that brought the convention screaming to its feet, but Carter gave the acceptance speech and went on to have his hat handed to him by old, likable Ronald Reagan. Mistakes get made that are impossible to unmake, and I don’t know why this year’s Democrats should be in any hurry to choose their candidate.

As for McCain, here’s what an unidentified friend of his had to say on the always readable blog of Chicago’s Tom Roeser: “He is irascible, short-tempered, has a temper like a blowtorch. . . . Let me tell you about this guy McCain. You get locked in solitary for five and a half years and get beaten up every day and you’ll start acting a little paranoid too . . .

“Do you know who I think he would most resemble as president?” McCain’s friend went on. “Andrew Jackson. Combative, mercurial and thin-skinned, with Scotch- Irish blood like McCain. He could hate with a biblical fury and change overnight. . . . John is not a guy you’d have for any task—but for this one, facing terrorism, he’s unparalleled.”

So here we are in 1828, the year Jackson was elected president. Or does a race between an underqualified but charismatic Democrat and a thin-skinned, short-tempered, paranoid Republican with a bead on America’s enemies bring us back to where we started, 1960?   

For more see Michael Miner’s blog, News Bites.

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