Health Insurance and the Bipartisan Canard

While most people on the left felt some satisfaction at the way Vice-President Joe Biden challenged Rep. Paul Ryan at last week's debate, there's one Romney campaign talking point that I wish Biden had demolished: that President Obama has not been bipartisan.

In the presidential debate, Mitt Romney touted his record as governor of Massachusetts: "I figured out from Day 1 I had to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done." An extensive New York Times article on Romney's record as governor notes that the reality was rather different: "Bipartisanship was in short supply." But put that aside. Let's give Romney the benefit of the doubt and accept his characterization that he governed in a bipartisan manner.

His great bipartisan achievement in Massachusetts was of course health insurance reform, which included at the state level the same individual mandate that conservatives now argue is tyranny when implemented by the federal government. Romney's claim to bipartisanship is that the Democratic legislature voted along with Republicans for his bill. Fair enough.

But what does that story tell us? The key to the wide bipartisan support for the bill was the simple fact that Sen. Ted Kennedy urged Massachusetts Democrats to support it, even though it contained what was then the conservative idea of an individual mandate. In short, the Democrats in the legislature, in order to achieve a liberal goal (universal coverage), agreed to a conservative method (individual mandate) of getting there. That was a bipartisan decision.

Fast forward to 2009-2010. President Obama, in the national debate on health insurance, tried to do exactly the same thing: in order to achieve a liberal goal, he agreed to a conservative method of getting there. He refused to stand with liberal Democrats who wanted a single-payer system--that was a non-starter with conservatives. He refused to go to the mat for a public option--that was also a non-starter for conservatives. He supported a solution that would increase the customers for private health insurance companies by using the power of government to encourage (and subsidize) the purchase of private insurance through the individual mandate. He did so to get conservative support for the idea.

You can't get much more bipartisan than that.

But, as Romney and Ryan are fond of pointing out, Obama's health care bill received zero Republican votes. Why? 

To hear Romney and Ryan tell the story, it was because Obama did not take a bipartisan approach. That is patently false. 

The real reason is that Republicans did not want health insurance reform to get done. They did not want President Obama to get anything done. 

According to Robert Draper's book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do -- Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican leaders of Congress met on inauguration day in 2009 and decided to oppose every substantive proposal the president put forward. Their simple strategy was this:

Show united and unyielding opposition to the President's economic policies. 
Win the spear point of the House in 2010.
Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011.
Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Paul Ryan was one of the participants at that meeting. He knows that it was the policy of his party to deny the president any Republican votes on any significant issue.

Nonetheless, Ryan had the unmitigated gall to say at the debate: "Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements."

The simple fact of the matter is that no one--no one--can get bipartisan agreements when one of the two parties has decided beforehand that their own partisan political goals are more important than achieving anything substantive for the country.

On a purely political level, there is a certain brilliance to the Republican strategy. Take advantage of Obama's sincere willingness to reach bipartisan compromise and use it to wring every possible concession to conservative ideas while the details of the legislation are being debated. Then force him to try to pass the legislation with only Democratic votes. He either fails to pass it at all (a win for the GOP) or he passes it without Republican votes and then the GOP slams him for failing to be bipartisan (also a win for the GOP). 

The losers, unfortunately, are the American people. But Republicans in their inauguration day meeting made it crystal clear that their own future political victories, not the welfare of the public, was their top priority.

So when Paul Ryan said, with incredibly hypocritical sanctimony, that he and Mitt Romney were all for bipartisanship, I wish Joe Biden had said something like FDR said in his Syracuse speech in 1936:

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job's being done.

That is as true today as it was then. We know what "bipartisan" means to today's Republican Party: unconditional surrender by the Democrats. What Biden should have said to Ryan is this: President Obama will seize every chance for true bipartisanship. But he will not submit to blackmail by a party that values its own electoral victories over the well-being of the American people.

That's a winning message.

Churchill and Islam

As I noted in my post last week, Winston Churchill cultivated the image of himself as the prophet who warned of the threats to liberty: first Hitler's Nazism, then Stalin's Communism. Now he is also being portrayed by others as a prophet who saw the threat of Islam over 100 years before 9/11.

If you do a Google search for "Churchill Islam" you will find endless pages, all quoting comments on Islam that Churchill wrote in his 1899 book The River War:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. 

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

The general tone of these pages is "Churchill saw it coming. He tried to warn us about Islamism, just as he warned us against Nazism and Communism." If one reads some of the commentary on pages which quote these words (and I can't recommend that anyone do so), there is, not surprisingly, a lot of anti-Muslim bigotry. But there is more than that: what emerges is the fusion of two different strands of thought, a strange amalgamation of the religious mindset of the Crusades with the ideological battles of the 20th century (especially the cold war).

The Crusader imagery is overt. One video, showcasing Churchill's remarks, begins with an image of a crusader knight, and then the blood-red title "The Crusader" fades in. It states, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, "Muslims have never been able to create anything really useful." It also asserts the cultural inferiority of Islamic lands: "Compare what billions of muslims [sic] have been able to come up with against a small number of Jewish intelligentsia, a fraction of one percent of the muslim [sic] population and the gulf between the ignorant backward culture of mohammedianism [sic] and other faith based cultures is obvious."

Others go back even further and refer in reverential terms to Charles Martel, who is praised as saving the West from Islam at the battle of Portiers in France in 732. On a web site that defends Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who has called for banning the Quran (he compares it to Mein Kampf), eliminating immigration from Muslim countries, and prohibiting the construction of new mosques, there is a comment that specifically connects Wilders to Martel and Churchill: "Geert Wilders is the modern European hero fighting against evil, like Charles Martell [sic], Jan Sobieski [who was responsible for the defeat of the Turks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683] and Winston Churchill."  As the picture below shows, the phrase "Islamo-fascism" further enhances the connection to Churchill the prophet.

In this mindset, we see the blanket condemnation of all things Muslim.  There is no attempt to distinguish between radicals and violent extremists on the one hand and peaceful adherents of Islam on the other. All Muslims are guilty. The current struggle is with the religion itself, and goes back 1400 years.

Of course, in most polite political circles today, such ideas are beyond the pale. What is so insidious about the Churchill quotation is that it is used to validate ancient historical prejudices and wrap them in a cloak of modern respectability. After all, to reject Churchill's words about Islam is to make yourself into a latter-day Neville Chamberlain, foolishly appeasing evil.

These sites also show how the tropes of anti-communism are being grafted onto Islamophobia. One of the first things that struck me is the prevalence of references to "useful idiots." Students of communism will recognize that phrase--it has been attributed to Lenin, to refer to naive liberals who trusted the radical communists and then were used by them.

Today the phrase has new currency referring to anyone who resists anti-Muslim bigotry. In 2002, Cal State Fresno professor Bruce Thornton wrote: "Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam." Conservative columnist Mona Charen used the phrase as the title of her 2004 book, suggesting a line of continuity from this alleged cold war naivete to the fight against Al Qaeda. What this signifies, I suspect, is how much Islam has come to replace communism in the right-wing mind since 9/11.

If this were all relegated to the darker corners of the internet, that would be one thing. But the Churchill quotation occasionally finds its way to more "respectable" places as well. Radio host Michael Savage has read it on his show, and then proceeded to talk about "front groups for radical Islam." (The phrase "front groups" of course also has a long anti-communist lineage.)

That same mindset of infiltration that is the point of Savage's rant is also behind the recent attack by Michele Bachmann and four other members of Congress on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin. In a letter to the State Department, they charge "information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about Department of State policies and activities that appear to be a result of the influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood." Like the red-baiters of the late 1940s and 1950s, they find in any policy with which they disagree the influence of the foreign "other."

The Churchill quotation shows up in the "comments" section of the website of Daniel Pipes, who has a doctorate in history from Harvard. After 9/11, Pipes created Islamist Watch, to track attempts to impose Islamic law on the U.S. His most recent post on his blog is fulsome in its praise of Mitt Romney's speech in Jerusalem. Pipes pays no attention to the most controversial part of the speech, in which Romney suggested that the reason that Israel's economy outpaces that of the Palestinians is culture: "if you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it’s this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference."

It is hard not to notice that Churchill's words associate Islam with poverty. I do not believe Romney was in any way referencing the Churchill quotation or trying to appeal to people familiar with it. (David Frum had an interesting post recently suggesting that Fox News often does engage in conscious appeals to this dark underside of our political discourse--he calls it the "Fox News Wink.")

My point is that once reasonable ideas can be bastardized by fringe elements, and then these more unseemly underground manifestations have a way of bubbling back up to mainstream discourse, even in ways that the speaker may not realize--but the listeners certainly do.

This Churchill quotation serves as a rhetorical bridge for extremists--it connects the modern struggle against radical Islamists such as Al Qaeda and its offshoots with both the historical defense of Christian Europe from the Muslim invaders and the liberal democratic capitalist resistance to the radical ideologies of the 20th century. That is a potent combination. It is also a toxic one. In neither case is it fueled by any sophisticated understanding of those historical episodes. Instead, it taps into the worst aspects--the fear and hatred and tribalism--that emerged from both.

Going back to the original incident that prompted this discussion--Romney's pander about returning the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office--I think the lesson is this: Words have historical baggage. When politicians are tempted to use certain forms of cultural shorthand to score quick and easy political points, they would be well-advised to tread carefully--you never know what kind of message you may be sending.

Churchill, Romney, and Modern American Conservatism

In Wednesday's post, I concluded with a series of questions:

How is it that a perceived slight to the memory of a British leader has come to suggest a lack of American patriotism?
How did Churchill become more "American" than the American president?
The bust of Churchill is obviously symbolic--but symbolic of what exactly?

My short answer is this: I think many of today's American conservatives who embrace Churchill do so because they embrace Churchill's vision of a world benignly managed by the "English-speaking peoples." Romney's pandering on the Churchill bust is a desperate attempt to both appeal to those conservatives and wrap himself in the image of a well-known decisive leader.

Seeing the waning power of the British Empire after World War II, Churchill sought to bolster it by forging not just an alliance with the United States, but something close to a union with it. That union, he argued, could effectively manage world affairs far into the future, as a new, updated, and revived version of the British Empire.

In a sense, Churchill became American because he sought to erase the differences between the British and the Americans. Churchill himself embodied that union--he was literally half-American. His mother was born in Brooklyn. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy even made him an honorary citizen of the United States (perhaps to immunize himself against charges that his anti-colonial Irish heritage made him hostile to Britain?), calling Churchill "a son of America though a subject of Britain."

Most importantly, Churchill almost single-handledly created the "special relationship." The phrase was in fact coined by Churchill himself in 1944, but he had held the idea for many years.  Fraser Harbutt, author of The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Cold War, writes that as early as 1931, Churchill believed that the "two great opposing forces of the future ... would be the English-speaking peoples and Communism." 

Today, most Americans tend to think of the "special relationship" in general terms to mean simply that the United States and Great Britain have been close allies since World War II. But for Churchill, it meant much more than that. The vision he sketched in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 was for a virtual Anglo-American union which would keep the postwar peace.

Churchill delivering the "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, MO, March 1946, with President Truman seated on his right.

Churchill used the phrase "special relationship" twice in his Fulton speech, and he said "English-speaking" people (or world) on five different occasions.

Churchill consciously cultivated not just a connection, but a complete identification between the two nations. The Fulton speech was a pivotal part of that. His conscious goal was to wed the two in common cause. He called the United States a "kindred nation" and said it was "necessary that the constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall rule and guide the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war."

For Churchill, the combination of Britain and America was essential. He said that to fail to achieve this virtual unity of Britain and the United States threatened the world with the return of "the dark ages." Peace depended on "what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America."

Few people today realize that the "special relationship" Churchill envisioned was far more ambitious than what actually developed. He called for the virtual merging of the American and British militaries: "It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. This would perhaps double the mobility of the American Navy and Air Force."

Churchill called for "such co-operation ... in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force" to insure that "there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary there will be an overwhelming assurance of security."

Churchill even looked forward to the day when not only he, but every Briton and every American, would be citizens of both countries: "Eventually there may come -- I feel eventually there will come -- the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny, whose outstretched arm many of us can already clearly see."

Churchill's vision was no short-term expedient, meant simply to meet the immediate postwar challenges: "if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for our time, but for a century to come."

What Churchill was proposing was nothing less than an Anglo-American condominium to keep the world peace; not the American Century, but the Anglo-American Century.

This, I argue, is why Churchill is even more attractive to some American neoconservatives today, 20 years after the end of the cold war, than he was during the cold war. We tend to remember the Fulton speech as a cold war warning only, but the fear of communism had a larger purpose for Churchill. Like Churchill, American neoconservatives believe that the "English-speaking peoples," by virtue of their "moral and material forces," are fit to manage the world.

Mitt Romney's trip to London not only prompted my questions; I think the complete story of that trip illustrates the above answer.

Romney made the statement about the Churchill bust at a fundraiser. He was not pandering to the British--by law Romney could only raise money from American citizens in Britain, not from British citizens. He was appealing to American conservatives who idolize Churchill.

But more importantly, the Churchill bust was not the only Romney story to come from the London trip. The controversial comments of unnamed "Romney advisors" are even more illuminating and make the connection between the bust and this larger foreign policy vision.

In a story in The Telegraph, those anonymous sources were quoted criticizing President Obama and explaining why a President Romney would be better for Britain. It is important to look at everything they said, to get the full effect:

"We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: "The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have."
"Obama is a Left-winger," said another. "He doesn’t value the Nato alliance as much, he’s very comfortable with American decline and the traditional alliances don’t mean as much to him. He wouldn’t like singing 'Land of Hope and Glory'." [This is roughly equivalent to criticizing a British leader for not being comfortable singing "God Bless America."]
The two advisers said Mr Romney would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009. One said Mr Romney viewed the move as 'symbolically important' while the other said it was 'just for starters,' adding: 'He is naturally more Atlanticist.'

After criticism of those comments (particularly the racial implications of the phrase "Anglo-Saxon heritage"), Romney "distanced himself" from them. "I don't agree with whoever that adviser is," Romney said.

Nonetheless, I think it is important to view Romney's Churchill bust remark in the context of these other comments. The Romney aides themselves made the connection--it was all of one piece. They said that Romney appreciates the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" (not all that different from "English-speaking peoples"), was "more naturally" comfortable with British culture and the "special relationship" and correctly predicted that Romney would say that he plans to make the "symbolically important" step of returning the Churchill bust to the Oval Office to signify all of those things.

In doing so, Romney is singing the Churchill-adoring, neoconservative tune.

The neoconservative choirmaster is Charles Krauthammer. It was Krauthammer who, in his column last week, revived this nonsense over the Churchill bust. The point of his piece, however, was that Romney's choices of destinations on his trip were meaningful. He would be the anti-Obama, affirming support for Britain and Israel and, via the trip to Poland, animosity toward Russia (they have trouble completely letting go of the cold war).

Krauthammer is an unabashed advocate of American unilateralism in foreign policy. Churchill's Fulton speech, despite the occasional nod to the new United Nations, is an argument against the kind of multilateralism that neoconservatives such as Krauthammer hold in utter disdain. Krauthammer believes--like Churchill--in the idea of a "benignly" managed empire.

As the cold war was ending in 1990--a time of transition not unlike 1946 in some ways--Krauthammer published "The Unipolar Moment."  He wrote: "The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is an unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies." He argued that the West needed to develop "antiballistic missile and air defense systems to defend against those weapons that do escape Western control or preemption." [emphasis added]

In Krauthammer's world view, the sin of multilateralism is that it seeks to "restrain the American Gulliver and remake him into a tame international citizen." For Krauthammer, the United States should always be the tamer, never the tamed.

A dozen years later, he argued that one "effect of September 11 was to accelerate the realignment of the current great powers, such as they are, behind the United States." It was, in a sense, Churchill's Fulton vision finally come to pass.

Writing on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, Krauthammer concluded confidently: "The new unilateralism argues explicitly and unashamedly for maintaining unipolarity, for sustaining America’s unrivaled dominance for the foreseeable future." That dominance would be "managed benignly" by the United States, he said. Americans had the duty to manage the world: "To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it."

This, effectively, was also what Churchill was saying to the United States in 1946. Churchill sought, of course, to be America's equal partner, while Krauthammer sees Britain as merely one of its attending allies. The vision is fundamentally the same: by virtue of its "moral and material forces," Americans must dominate the international system.

To the extent that Mitt Romney has had a foreign policy vision, this is it. As I noted in an analysis of Romney's speech at the Citadel back in October, the Romney foreign policy amounts to little more than mindless muscle-flexing. He said then, in a passage he repeated a couple of weeks ago in a speech to the VFW: "This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today." In ominous tones reminiscent of the Fulton speech, he warned of a "global alliance of authoritarian states." His simple-minded answer was a "strategy of American strength" leading to a new "American century."

Romney's foreign policy advisors are working hard to cast him in a Churchillian mold, to present him as strong where President Obama is allegedly weak and "eager to address the world with an apology on his lips."

This superficial attempt to claim the mantle of Churchill should make all Americans suspicious. Recall who started all of this by requesting that bust of Churchill in the first place: George W. Bush.

Why did Bush want the bust? It seems Churchill reminded him of, well, himself:

People said why would you be interested in having a bust of an Englishman in your Oval Office and the answer is that he was one of the great leaders in the 20th century. He stood on principle. He was a man of great courage. He knew what he believed, and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me, wasn't afraid of public opinion polls, he wasn't afraid of, he didn't need focus groups to tell him what was right, he charged ahead and the world is better for it.

Bush wanted to associate himself with those leadership traits that he identified in Churchill, and we know how that turned out. Bush was, to say the least, no Churchill.

Now Mitt Romney is doing the same thing. As Bush once tried to say, "Fool me once ..."

[In the course of working on this post, I concluded that I have two separate explanations that I'd like to explore--one more respectable (above), another more disturbing. I'll examine the latter in a subsequent post.]

Romney's Foreign Bust

No, I'm not referring to Mitt's misadventures abroad this week. Those have received substantial (and in some cases, hilarious) attention. I mean the Churchill bust.

While holding a fundraiser in London that reportedly raked in over $2 million for Romney's campaign, Romney said: "I’m looking forward to the bust of Winston Churchill being in the Oval Office again."

In doing so, he revived a silly story that made the rounds early in the Obama presidency. In the years since, it has become common in anti-Obama emails bouncing around the internet. It goes like this: Obama, seething with anger over Britain's colonial rule over Kenya, deliberately insulted Great Britain by evicting a bust of Churchill that had been in the Oval Office ever since 9/11 July 2001.

In reality, the bust was on temporary loan, as the White House has repeatedly pointed out. The British Embassy in Washington issued this statement to clear it up:

The bust of Sir Winston Churchill, by Sir Jacob Epstein, was lent to the George W Bush administration from the UK’s Government Art Collection, for the duration of the Presidency. When that administration came to an end so did the loan; the bust now resides in the British Ambassador’s Residence in Washington DC. The White House collection has its own Epstein bust of Churchill, which President Obama showed to Prime Minister Cameron when he visited the White House in March.

In short, there was no anti-colonial pique on Obama's part. So why all the fuss?

Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama examine the bust that still resides in the White House.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

There are two things at work here. One is the ongoing, pervasive attempt to present President Obama as a foreign "other." Obama's alleged motivation in this fable is his identification with this Kenyan heritage. Though not nearly as stupid as the birther claim that he was born in Kenya, this slightly more respectable version plays footsie with bitherism. Its height was Dinesh D'Souza's article in Forbes (later made more famous by Newt Gingrich) that asserted that the key to understanding Obama was that he inherited an "anti-colonial ideology" from his Kenyan father. Lately, Romney has been flirting with this fringe concept by repeatedly referring to Obama's ideas as "extraordinarily foreign."

The other factor, however, has little to do with Obama. It is the odd love affair today's American conservatives have with Winston Churchill.

I'm not saying there is nothing to admire in Churchill. In 2002, a poll in Britain named him the most admired Briton in history (though in 2008, in another poll, 23% of Britons said he was a myth while 53% said Sherlock Holmes was real). In the 1950s, Americans regularly placed him among the top ten most admired figures in the world.

That makes sense. Through radio reports and movie newsreels, Americans came to know Churchill during World War II. He personified the stoic, gritty, stubborn resistance of the British people to Hitler's aggression.

What strikes me as odd, however, is the fawning, uncritical hero-worship of Churchill among American conservatives nearly 50 years after his death.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Churchill's reputation was based to a great extent on his record as a critic of appeasement. Unlike Neville Chamberlain and his government, Churchill recognized Hitler's danger early on. (Churchill's champions rarely recall, however, that three weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, Churchill criticized the young Englishmen of the Oxford Union Society who voted not to "fight for country or King" by comparing them unfavorably to young Germans: "I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward on the road of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland.")

For a generation of Americans that came to see appeasement as the great failure of their times, Churchill was the unheeded prophet. When he came to Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 and delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech, Churchill quite consciously exploited that status and looked to convert it into American support for a hard-line policy against the Soviet Union: "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention."

In conservative circles in the United States after World War II, it became commonplace to deride Franklin D. Roosevelt as the naive, idealistic dupe who was taken in by Stalin at Yalta, while Churchill was the wise, cunning statesman who was never fooled by the communist dictator.

This is a convenient myth. Shortly after the Yalta meeting, Churchill remarked to Hugh Dalton: "Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I am wrong about Stalin."

Like FDR, Churchill thought the Yalta agreement was the best they could do, given the power realities on the ground in Europe. In the decades since, however, the myth of Churchill's prescience has only grown, fostered in no small part by his own conscious cultivation of it in his memoirs and elsewhere. As he once put it: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

But this image alone is, I think, inadequate to explain the fetishizing of Churchill today--particularly the way it has grown over the last decade.

How is it that a perceived slight to the memory of a British leader has come to suggest a lack of American patriotism?

How did Churchill become more "American" than the American president?

The bust of Churchill is obviously symbolic--but symbolic of what exactly?

I'll attempt to answer that in my next post.

Bain's Back

Newt tried to warn the GOP primary voters, but they wouldn't listen.

Not that you can really blame them--after all, Newt wasn't exactly a good alternative. Nor was anyone else in the GOP primary field. But they were warned.

Six months ago, I wrote a piece on Newt's attacks on Mitt Romney's leadership at Bain. As I argued back then, that debate revealed the tension between two basic ideological components of the Reagan coalition that have always been at odds: traditional values and free markets (especially the amoral changes that result from the unrestrained activities thereof).

Today, all the political commentators are in a tizzy over when exactly Romney gave up control over Bain, and whether he is responsible for decisions made between 1999 and 2002. That's interesting in a micro-, inside-the-Beltway kind of way, I suppose. But I still think the important question is why Romney is trying so hard to distance himself from those business activities.

The answer lies, I think, in that tension.

The reason Romney is so intent on claiming that he had nothing whatsoever to do with Bain's business decisions after 1999 is that the company was involved in sending jobs overseas. In free market terms, that's entirely justifiable. If there's more profit from cheap labor overseas, away go the jobs. But it also violates traditional values like patriotism and support for working families. Politically, that's dicey.

Back in January, rather than address that tension, Romney did what Romney does: he took the easy way out. Gingrich made the moral argument: "Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do." Romney did not engage Newt on substance, he did not try to explain why what might seem like unsavory business practices were in fact "the right thing to do." Instead, he accused Gingrich of putting "free enterprise on trial."

The consequence of that decision is that Romney failed to either 1) embrace the idea that there should be moral restraints on business by agreeing with Gingrich or 2) counter that idea and argue that while sending American jobs overseas in search of greater profits hurts some people in the short run, it serves the greater good in the long run.

Had Romney done either, he'd be in a position to fight today's attack from the Obama campaign. Instead, he did what he always does: he ducked the question, he refused to take any clear stand.

I wrote in January that Newt was warning Republican voters, "if they nominate Mitt Romney, [they] are handing this potent political issue to President Obama, and with it, possibly, an essential component of Republican political success over the last 30 years."

That's where we are today. If, as some people are suggesting, Romney were now to disown those practices openly, he would be accused (rightly) of flip-flopping and adopting Newt's old position, the one he described as putting free enterprise on trial. If he were to defend them openly, as others suggest, he would alienate working class voters who might otherwise vote for him.

So what does he do? Neither. He just says that he had nothing to do with those practices because he had left Bain already, so he does not need to pass judgment on them either way. That's why he is so intent on saying he left Bain in 1999--so he can avoid taking a stand.

I believe that is why this incident may end up hurting Romney badly. The specific issues--when did he leave Bain, what do the SEC documents mean--are too arcane for most voters to follow. But people know when someone is afraid to take a stand. They see it when someone can't give a straight answer to a simple question. They sense when someone has something to hide.

Right now, everything about Romney's words and behavior sends those signals to voters.

He either failed to see the importance of Newt's critique in January, or he saw it and ignored it because of his short-term focus on getting the nomination. Regardless, his failure to address it honestly then is costing him now, and as a result, my conclusion then seems even more apt now:

"If Obama can take advantage of Romney's moral blindness and regain a significant number of Reagan Democrats, he will win re-election. If he can go further and recapture the mantle of the moral dimension of politics, he can realign American politics and fracture the Reagan coalition."

Ike & Joe & Mitt & Donald

Nearly 60 years ago, during the 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower had to work hard to unite a potentially fractious Republican Party. In the nomination fight, he had vanquished Sen. Robert Taft, whom Ike considered dangerously isolationist in his foreign policy. Eisenhower also had to contend with the anti-communist demagoguery of Joe McCarthy.

Two years earlier, McCarthy had quickly made a name for himself by claiming to have a list (which he never, of course, produced) of known Communist Party members who were employed by the State Department. While he never uncovered a single actual Communist, McCarthy's bluster kept his name in the papers.

Privately, Ike expressed his contempt for McCarthy."I will not get into the gutter with this guy," he told aides who encouraged him to publicly denounce the Wisconsin senator.

But late in the campaign, in October 1952, Eisenhower faced a decision. McCarthy had slandered George C. Marshall, the United States Army Chief of Staff during World War II and Secretary of State and then Secretary of Defense under President Truman. McCarthy called Marshall "a man steeped in falsehood," and suggested that he had deliberately sabotaged American policy in China: "If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country's interest."

As Truman later pointed out, Marshall was "the man who had done more for Eisenhower than anyone else on earth.... Every major promotion that Eisenhower got, every major assignment, came about because George Marshall recommended it or ordered it."

Eisenhower and McCarthy, Oct. 1952.
Photo by Robert Boyd, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Credit: Wisconsin Historical Society

So what would Ike do: defend his mentor Marshall or appease the demagogue McCarthy? His first instinct was to do the former. He was headed for McCarthy's home state, and his speech writers prepared a draft praising Marshall. His aides leaked word of that to the press. McCarthy heard and managed to board Ike's campaign train on its way to Milwaukee, and argued that Ike should omit those statements. Though he reportedly reacted with "red-hot anger" to McCarthy, Ike caved. He appeared on the same platform with McCarthy, removed the praise of Marshall from his speech, and echoed some of McCarthy's anti-communist rhetoric.

Truman was appalled. He thought Marshall "one of the most decent and honorable men this country has ever produced." He wrote privately that the incident showed Ike was "chickenhearted" and a "weak man cowering at a mental image of McCarthy's pugnacious face and rasping voice."

The recent spectacle of Mitt Romney attending a fund-raiser with Donald Trump brought this old story to mind, because it raises the same questions of character in politics. Trump, of course, has made himself notorious as the most prominent proponent of the discredited idea that President Obama was not born in Hawaii. Romney has received a fair amount of heat for his embrace of Trump. When asked about it, he replied:

"You know I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in." This is no doubt true. It is also irrelevant. No reasonable person believes that candidates for office are personally responsible for all of the views of all of their supporters.

Romney and Trump, Feb. 2012.
Steve Marcus / Reuters

But that was not the issue. This was no run-of-the-mill supporter. This was someone famous, whose recent notoriety is due to spouting a demonstrably false conspiracy theory about Romney's opponent.

This is someone with whom Romney chose to do a fund-raiser. It is entirely fair to assume that choosing to share a stage with someone implies there are no important disagreements with that individual.

The question to Romney really should have been: "Is there anything Donald Trump could say that would lead you to forego doing a fund-raiser with him?"

Presumably the answer is "yes," which then leads to the follow-up: why doesn't Trump's birther nonsense meet that standard? After all, what Trump is suggesting is that the President of the United States is illegitimate and a fraud. Romney knows this, but it changes nothing about his relationship with Trump. Why does Romney choose to associate with someone who stoops to such baseless demagoguery?

Fortunately, Romney answered that question without it being asked: "I need to get 50.1 percent or more." In other words, his answer is no different that the one Eisenhower would given: it was politics.

Romney's shape-shifting from moderate to "severely conservative" means that the conservative Republican base does not trust him. Many of those same people consistently express doubt that the president was born in the U.S.A. So Romney indirectly panders to them by embracing their spokesman, even as he tries to maintain credibility with sane voters by accepting the facts about Obama's birthplace.

Eisenhower had a similar problem. As a career military man, no one even knew which political party he belonged to until shortly before the 1952 campaign. He defeated "Mr. Republican" (Robert Taft) for the nomination, but still had to prove himself to the far right McCarthyites. He tried to do that by choosing Sen. Richard Nixon as his running mate (Nixon, due to his role in the Alger Hiss case, was seen as the smart man's McCarthy).

But it was not enough. It never is for the politically rabid. McCarthy bullied Ike into forsaking the man most responsible for the fact that Eisenhower was ever considered a potential president. For Eisenhower, it worked politically. He cruised to victory in 1952. But it sullied his reputation as a man of personal loyalty and honor.

It may work politically for Romney, too. His willingness to get down in the gutter with Trump, his refusal to scorn the chief proponent of birtherism, however, makes it hard to see Romney as a man of character. And so his problem becomes circular--because there is no "there" there, he constantly needs to pander to the base; the more he panders to the base, the more he proves that there really is no "there" there.

Let's Play "Name That Candidate!"

The following passage comes from a major address by the nominee for president of a major political party:

Whatever progress has been made we all accept.... there are certain principles that are accepted by substantially all of the American people. They cannot be treated as partisan principles. They are national policies. For instance, the policy of providing the farmer with a fair share of the national income is a national policy.... We say to you workers that the right of collective bargaining by labor's own free choice is not a partisan right. It is a national policy. The principle of setting a floor under wages is likewise an established principle. That floor should be raised as rapidly as our increasing prosperity permits... It is national policy to set a limit to the hours of labor. Whenever those hours are exceeded, overtime must be paid at the rate of time and a half. Social Security is a national policy. And so are old age pensions. Nobody has a patent on them. It is national policy to care for the unemployed.... It is national policy to care for the aged, the sick, the physically handicapped, the blind, and others who need our help.

I admit, this isn't an easy one. He did not go on to become president, so he's less well-known. So how about this question instead: which political party does he belong to, the Democratic or Republican?

Answer: The Republican Party.

This is from Wendell Willkie's final speech of the 1940 campaign, given over the radio, originating from a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

I came across this speech doing some research, and was somewhat dumbfounded when I read it. Even allowing for the real possibility that Willkie's support for all of these "national policies" might have been more rhetorical than real (after all, Paul Ryan today has the chutzpah to claim that his plan to end Medicare is really meant to "save" it), this is remarkable.

My first thought was the rather obvious one: can anyone imagine the Republican nominee in 2012 full-throatedly supporting all of these policies that were enthusiastically embraced by the Republican nominee 72 years ago in 1940?

To be fair, Willkie also said things that could easily have come from Romney's mouth in this campaign: "We believe ... that in order to protect [these benefits] and to extend them it is necessary to have a government that is financially sound."

In fact, Willkie's defense policy statement is almost exactly the same as Romney's: "All of us believe in the need for a powerful national defense. But our administration ... would have it so powerful that no aggressor would ever dare or seek to strike."

Romney has repeatedly said in this campaign: "I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it."

Those similarities notwithstanding, it is remarkable to see how different the rhetoric is.

Willkie supported collective bargaining, while Romney has praised Gov. Walker's and Gov. Kasich's efforts to limit collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Willkie supported not only the concept of a minimum wage, but anticipated increasing it, while Romney is against an increase and in the past has proposed at most indexing it to inflation (which would have the effect of never increasing it in fact). Some Republicans (e.g., Ron Paul and Tea Party leader and former congressman Dick Armey) even favor abolishing it.

Willkie talks about caring for the unemployed, while Romney has opposed extending unemployment benefits and has even said he'd like to see "reform of our unemployment system, to allow people to have a personal account which they're able to draw from as opposed to having endless unemployment benefits." In other words, he would privatize it and end any government responsibility for the unemployed.

Willkie says it is "national policy" to care for the sick, but Romney would repeal the Affordable Care Act and has proposed no national policy to advance the cause of providing health insurance for the uninsured.

Willkie supported Social Security and old age pensions, while Romney would increase the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare.

The unavoidable conclusion is how far to the right the Republican Party (and, to some extent, the Democratic Party) has moved over the last 70 years, with most of that rightward movement having taken place in the last twenty years.

It has become commonplace to note that Ronald Reagan, the nominee in 1980, and Richard Nixon, the nominee in 1968, would be too liberal for today's Republican  Party. Turns out, Wendell Willkie in 1940 would be, too.

Romney's Stephen Douglas Problem

When Stephen Douglas was running for re-election to the United States Senate from Illinois in 1858, he was in some sense running two races at once. He already had his sights set on the Democratic nomination for president in 1860. The latter was far more likely if he were to succeed at the former. But winning the Senate race in his state might require that he say things that could cost him the national nomination.

The most tricky issue in 1858 was slavery in the territories. The new Republican Party had as its foundational principle that slavery should not be allowed to expand into any new territories, putting it on "the course of ultimate extinction," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase. This was generally a popular position in free states, but was anathema to southern Democrats. Douglas tried to finesse the issue by removing the federal government from the matter entirely: he stood for the concept of "popular sovereignty," under which the people of the territories themselves would decide whether or not to allow slavery. Rather than take a clear stand for or against slavery in territories, Douglas sought to elide the problem by being for the idea of democratic choice--regardless of what that choice was.

The Douglas dilemma came to mind this week now that it is undeniable that Mitt Romney's path to the 2012 GOP nomination is clear. Like Douglas, Romney's political instinct is to try to avoid unequivocal statements on thorny issues. Clarity, he seems to think, is the enemy of his ambition.

Romney's recent interview with Diane Sawyer has a prime example. Sawyer asked Romney about one of his most blatant political transformations, from pro-choice to pro-life. Note how Romney responded:

I would love the Supreme Court to say, "Let's send this back to the states," rather than having a federal mandate through Roe v. Wade, let the states again consider this issue state by state rather than having this--the setting that we have now with a federal mandate being imposed in all the states.

This is Romney's "popular sovereignty" position: get the federal government out of the issue entirely. He even subtly associates Roe with the unpopular health care "mandate,"claiming the states rights mantle in opposition to an overbearing federal government.

What his position tries to mask is Romney's profound discomfort with the issue:

I believe that--that--that the right course for--for the nation would be for individuals to be concerned with both those lives. And I know people come down on both sides of that issue and feel very deeply about it. But I'm pro life--that's my view.

Romney seems to be trying to say several things:

1) The president doesn't have the power to affect this--the Supreme Court does--so it does not really matter what I think.

2) If the Court did reverse Roe, it would simply send it back to the states, so liberal states like New York and Massachusetts would continue to have it, while conservative states like Kansas, which have come close to banning abortion in practice, could do so outright. So pro-choice moderates, don't worry too much--your states would get to keep it, in the unlikely event the Court overturned the decision.

3) If you're pro-life, I am too. If you're pro-choice, I can't change anything. So whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, vote for me.

For strong pro-life voters, this won't do. If abortion is intrinsically evil, it is not enough that some states outlaw it. They want a constitutional amendment banning on it--they don't want to abolish the "federal mandate" Romney criticizes. They want to reverse it and create a new federal mandate that no state allow abortion. Their problem is not with a mandate per se, but with the substance of the current mandate.

Similarly for strong pro-choice voters, the principle of a woman's right to choose is not something that can be allowed to exist some places and not others. The language of "rights" means that one's ability to exercise one's rights should not depend on whether one is in Massachusetts or Kansas.

This is what Romney does when he knows that "people come down on both sides of that issue and feel very deeply about it." He tries to appeal to both, but he can't. The positions are irreconcilable. That doesn't, however, keep him from trying.

And that is Romney's core weakness as a candidate. It is the same one Lincoln recognized in Douglas. In their fifth debate in 1858, Lincoln blasted Douglas for "his declaration that he 'don't care whether Slavery is voted up or down.'" Lincoln, by contrast, was clear and unequivocal: he thought slavery was wrong and should be voted down.

Lincoln knew who he was and what he believed. He did not try to be all things to all voters. In the second debate, he instructed the audience to vote against him if they were not truly with him:

If it be true, that on the grounds which I occupy ... my views, though partly coinciding with yours, are not as perfectly in accordance with your feelings as his are, I do say to you in all candor, Go for him and not for me.

Can you imagine Mitt Romney saying that in the fall debates with President Obama? Me neither. The very question it raises--what are the grounds Romney occupies?--is damning.

There is no easy political lesson here. Douglas, after all, won that race in 1858. As Lincoln ruefully noted, "Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down, and to uphold the Slave interest."

But Lincoln also correctly noted that Douglas had won an immediate, and not long-run, victory: "No ingenuity can keep those antagonistic elements in harmony long." The things Douglas had said in fending off Lincoln in 1858 ended up so alienating southern Democrats that they refused to support him as the nominee in 1860, the party split, and Lincoln became president.

Romney's ingenuity has allowed him to survive the Republican primaries. It may even get him the presidency. Whether the reckoning comes this November or during a Romney presidency, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that "No ingenuity can keep those antagonistic elements in harmony long." Someone so lacking a center cannot and will not be a successful leader, even if he does manage to be a successful candidate.

Talking Baseball (and Mitt Romney)

[This post is not even remotely historical. I'm not even pretending.]

Campaigning in Michigan the other day, Mitt Romney got one of those questions that has nothing substantive to do with politics, but can have actual political consequences:

"Tigers or Red Sox?"

"Oh, Red Sox, I'm afraid," Romney answered. "I've lived in Massachusetts for how many years now? Forty years."

That really is the perfect Romney line, isn't it? If I had to script just one line that would capture everything that people who don't like Romney don't like about Romney, I think that would be it.

Let me explain. As I see it, the essence of Mitt Romney's problem connecting politically is the feeling many of us get that there is no there there, that there is nothing you can hold onto and depend upon about the guy. For any true-blue fan of any sports team, this Romney reply says exactly that.

I was born and raised in New Jersey, to parents who both grew up in New York City. We lived my entire childhood in the New York media market. My teams growing up were the New York Giants in football and the New York Mets in baseball. I got the former from my dad who has rooted for the Giants almost as long as there has been a team called the Giants.

I picked up the Mets on my own, probably influenced by the hysteria over the 1969 Miracle Mets (though I don't actually remember following them at that time). But I was a full-fledged fan in plenty of time to share the agony of Willie Mays, captured in this picture from the 1973 World Series which the Mets lost in seven games to the Oakland A's. That image of Mays, one of the greatest to ever play the game, is seared into my memory.

Willie Mays argues with umpire Augie Donatelli after teammate Bud Harrelson was thrown out at home plate in Game 2 of the 1973 World Series in Oakland, CA on October 14, 1973. Photo by Jerry Cooke/ Sports Illustrated/ Getty Images

I left New Jersey in 1985 for graduate school in Texas. Since then, I've lived in New Jersey for maybe a total of four years. I've lived in South Carolina for over ten years now. But you know what? Those are still my teams.

When a friend and colleague with season tickets to the Carolina Panthers invited me to join him at the Panthers-Giants game some years ago, I proudly wore my Giants cap to the stadium in Charlotte. I didn't become a Panthers fan. Because real fans do not abandon their allegiance to the team they grew up rooting for just because they move to someplace else. Because it's about staying loyal.

Because being a fan of that team, your team, becomes part of your identity. It's the team your dad rooted for, the team you and your dad watched together when you were a kid. When my Giants made their amazing run this year, ending with a Super Bowl victory, in my family there was series of emails after each improbable victory: my dad, my brother, my sister's son, and by extension, my nephew's infant son who was born right before the Giants began their run. (In my family, little Ryan is responsible for all of those Giant victories. And don't dare try to tell us any differently.)

Being a fan--a real fan--is a part of who you are, and you stay true to who you are. That doesn't change because you move out of state.

But Romney? He moved to Massachusetts, so he roots for the Red Sox. Of course he does.

Romney may have thought he was saying the politically brave thing, since he was in Michigan at that moment, talking to Michigan reporters, and went with the Red Sox rather than Michigan's Detroit Tigers. But then, naturally, he had to claim the Tigers, too.

"I grew up as a Tigers fan, of course, and Al Kaline was my hero." But then, you know, he moved, so ...

New state, new team. New political race, new ideology.

Really, it is just perfect. As president, I guess he'd be a Nationals fan. It would serve him right.

"You Republicans" and "We Conservatives"

I was reading last week about the 1940 presidential election for a book I'm working on. Coinciding as it did with Mitt Romney's latest stumble on his way to the Republican nomination, I couldn't help thinking he had a few things in common with the GOP's standard bearer that year, Wendell Willkie.

After being crushed in consecutive elections by FDR, Republicans were desperate for a winner in 1940. Prior to 1932, Republicans were accustomed to winning presidential elections: from 1896 through 1928, they won seven out of nine contests. The only exceptions were 1912 and 1916. In the former, the Republican vote split between the sitting Republican president William Howard Taft and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, delivering the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson who got just 41.8% of the popular vote. Four years later, Wilson eked out a narrow re-election victory.

In short, Republicans had come to feel the presidency really belonged to them before FDR. Going into the 1940 campaign, they had two reasons to hope for a comeback: 1) FDR might not be a candidate, because of the two-term tradition; and 2) though the economy was much improved from the depths of the depression in 1932, it was nowhere near true recovery (unemployment was down from 25% to between 14 and 15%).

The problem for the Republicans was that they had not come to any consensus about their way forward as a party. Should they hold onto the low-tax, laissez-faire approach (which many Americans still blamed for the depression) and fight for repeal of the entire New Deal, or reconcile themselves to a "New Deal Lite" policy that merely promised to manage the new social welfare programs better?

As a result, the Republican convention was torn in 1940, needing six ballots to settle at last on a nominee: corporate lawyer and businessman Wendell Willkie. 

Willkie was an odd choice. He had never held elective office. He had been a delegate to the 1932 Democratic convention. 

That fact alone made him highly suspect to many Republicans (and reminds one of Romney's vote in the 1992 Democratic primary, as well as his past claims to be a "moderate" with "progressive" policies).  

One former Republican senator had this reaction to the thought of this former Democrat getting the GOP nomination:

If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I'd personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But, by the Eternal, I'd not ask her to lead the choir the first night.

Yet this convert bested elected Republican officials like Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, because the business wing of the party and the liberal eastern establishment supported his nomination--because they thought they could control him.

But when it came time to speak to the convention, Willkie slipped. As he finished his acceptance speech, he said:

And so, you Republicans, I call upon you to join me, help me. The cause is great. We must win.

That phrase was the tell: "you Republicans." Willkie had given away the game. Deep down, he didn't really consider himself a Republican.

I couldn't help but think of that phrase when I heard Mitt Romney at CPAC on Friday repeatedly say things like "we, as conservatives ..." He used some form of the word "conservative" over twenty times. He was so intent to avoid pulling a Willkie, that he repeatedly did the anti-Willkie.

The effect, however, was much the same. He was so desperate to say that he is a conservative that he undermined the case that he is one.

There are, of course, many differences between Willkie and Romney, but some of the parallels are telling.

One is the absence of ideological clarity, the focus (in both cases) on "electability."

In 1940, Willkie got the nomination because enough Republicans feared that a real Republican, someone too much like Herbert Hoover, would lose. Though they would have been loathe to admit it openly, they recognized that things like Social Security had been accepted by the public. More importantly, the public had also largely accepted the general idea that the federal government should have a role in managing the economy and mitigating the wild swings of the unregulated market. Willkie would not be a hard-edged ideologue, he would win over disgruntled Democrats, he could win.

As I have noted recently, many of today's Republicans also seem more concerned with defeating President Obama than deciding what exactly the party's principles should be. While they are united in pledging to abolish what they call "Obamacare," you'll rarely hear them say that they want to go back to allowing insurance companies to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions, or that they want to throw children under 26 off their parents' policies. They rail against the individual mandate, but can't agree on why they do. What they all agree on is that they want to beat Obama, and will support whoever seems most likely to do that.

Second, in both cases, the party looked to a businessman, someone who had not served politically in Washington, someone who claimed expertise as a manager and executive who could run things more efficiently.

As David Kennedy notes in Freedom From Fear, Willkie was "a leading spokesman for those in the business community who felt themselves aggrieved by the New Deal." He would restore a pro-business climate. Willkie did not explicitly reject the New Deal, but he "denounced the Democrats as having acquired vested political interest in the Depression and therefore as having willfully throttled the wealth-making and job-creating potential of private enterprise." 

It takes little imagination to hear Romney saying precisely that about Obama. While Romney served as a governor (and was, as he told CPAC, a "severely conservative" one), his campaign has focused overwhelmingly on his private sector experience in a way that emphasizes pragmatic management more than ideology.

One major difference, however, would be foreign policy.

In 1940, most of the other Republican candidates for president were from the isolationist wing of the party. Though most Americans remained determined to avoid direct involvement in the war, they supported FDR's efforts to aid Britain short of war. So did Willkie.

Willkie even went so far as refusing to exploit foreign policy in the campaign. When FDR decided to send 50 old destroyers to Britain in early September 1940, Willkie did not make an issue of it. When two weeks later the administration supported a peace-time draft, Willkie was told that opposing it would help him politically. But he favored it. Willkie replied, "I'd rather not win the election than do that."

I'd like to think that, if the issue were important enough, Romney would say the same. But given his rank opportunism and foreign policy demagoguery so far in this campaign, I can't say I'm confident he would.

(To be fair, even Willkie, in his desperation late in the campaign, called the destroyers-for-bases deal "the most dictatorial act ever taken by an American president," and dabbled in some FDR-as-war-monger rhetoric.)

In the end, Willkie lost. That was most likely because, with the world in flames, most Americans wanted FDR's experienced hand on the wheel. But that's not how Republican conservatives saw it.

Historian Richard Ketchum says that for "twenty-four years the resentment would fester, the schism would be unresolved."  At the 1964 convention, 

Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen rose on the floor ..., pointed a finger at the New York and Pennsylvania delegations, led by Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, and shouted at those reminders of Wendell Willkie: 'You led us down the road to defeat ...' And at last the Old Guard chose one of its own, Barry Goldwater, only to see him crushed in the worst defeat in any presidential election to that time.

If Romney gets this nomination and loses in the fall, it won't take 24 years. In four years, the Tea Party and conservative wing will likely say "You led us down the road to defeat" to the establishment, and chose one of its own.

If that happens, the big, historic question will be this: will that nominee end up being Goldwater in 1964, or Reagan in 1980?

The Republicans: The New Whigs?

I've never seen a poll on this, but I'd guess that most Americans couldn't identify the Whigs. Of all the major political parties in American history (defined as those that got at least one president elected), they remain the most obscure. Their brief history, however, is looking strangely relevant to me these days.

The Whigs were one of the two major parties in what American historians call the second party system. The first party system was the Federalists (led by Washington, Adams, and Hamilton) and the Republicans (led by Jefferson and Madison), which lasted roughly from the 1790s to the 1810s. The third is today's Democrats and Republicans, which emerged in the mid-1850s. In between was the second, made up of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs.

I've always found it a bit of challenge to teach about the Whigs, because they represented an odd collection of views. The very name reflected their amorphous identity.

The name has two meanings. Since they claimed as a foundational principle a dedication to the republican government of the Founders, and the Whigs were the anti-monarchy party in Britain, the American Whigs adopted the same name.

There was a second meaning, however. On a practical level, one of the organizing principles of the party was its opposition to Andrew Jackson, whose high-handed style led them to label him "King Andrew." So the American "Whigs" were the opponents of the "King," Andrew Jackson.

This led to some odd political bedfellows in the Whig Party. While it is certainly possible to identify a Whig ideology (active government, particularly in pursuit of economic development), there were also members of the party who were not supporters of the ideology, but who sided with the Whigs out of an anti-Jackson animus.

So, for example, when Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun and the state of South Carolina during the nullification crisis of 1832-33--despite the fact that the Democrats were the party of states rights--some of the more vehement supporters of states rights joined the Whigs.

The resulting ideological incoherence came out in the presidential election of 1840, the first the party ever won. To hold together its diverse anti-Jackson coalition in the race against Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, the Whigs nominated the old Indian-fighting general, William Henry Harrison.

For most Americans, that campaign is remembered (if at all) for its alliterative slogan: "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!" John Tyler, the vice-presidential candidate, was in the words of Daniel Walker Howe an "eccentric Virginia state-righter," who joined the Whigs "because he found Andrew Jackson high-handed."

The Whigs, as Howe notes, "possessed a more coherent program" than the Democrats, but when Harrison died only month into his presidency, Tyler--who did not believe in most of that program--became president. He then proceeded to thwart his own party on important issues such as a national bank and tariff policy. The ideological incoherence of the Whigs wrecked their first administration.

What does this have to do with today?

My last post examined the ways that various forms of conservative thinking have been clashing below the mudslinging surface in the Republican debates. This, I argue, suggests an ideological cracking up of the Reagan coalition that has survived and prospered since 1980.

What holds it together? Right now, one thing: hatred of Barack Obama.

No matter how nasty things get in this primary season, all of the candidates and their surrogates return to that theme: the need to defeat Obama. After winning the Florida primary Tuesday, Mitt Romney tweeted:

Thank you FL! While we celebrate this victory, we must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.

Whenever they are searching for unity, they go back to that.

That's fairly natural. Obama is the incumbent president, after all. But there is a particularly harsh edge to it this time. It's personal, it's vitriolic, it's irrational. And it's potent.

That is what reminds me so much of the 1830s: the tendency to reduce the party platform to the opposition to an individual, to personalize everything. It is no coincidence that its enemies never call it "The Affordable Care Act," but rather "ObamaCare." There is a whole "King Obama" meme on the internet, like this Photoshopping of Obama's head onto a famous painting of Emperor Napoleon.

The effects of another Obama term are put in apocalyptic terms. It's not his policies, but his person. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, in a Romney radio ad, says: "America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama." Seriously? Cannot survive? This, from the campaign whose slogan is "Believe in America"?

Of course, apocalyptic rhetoric is practically the norm in American presidential elections. One Whig, in the 1840 campaign, said the following about President Van Buren:

Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order, there you may be certain of a voter for Van Buren.

Republicans today would need to do little more than change the name.

There is, of course, not much evidence put forth to justify the gloom and doom. As comedian Bill Maher noted, the opposition to Obama is mostly to a deluded fantasy of the man, not the actual president: "Republicans have created this completely fictional president ... The Republican hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling about what he might do, what he's thinking, what he secretly wants to change."

Note how Gingrich put it Tuesday night: "If Barack Obama gets re-elected, it will be a disaster for the United States of America, make no bones about it.... you can’t imagine how radical he’ll be in his second term." No, Newt, I can't. Because he has never been a radical president, outside of your fevered imagination. The Republican caricature of "Obama the radical" is nothing but imagining.

(Again, this is not unlike the Whig caricature of Jackson--he was called "King Andrew," but his era is now more commonly known as the "Age of the Common Man," because of the democratizing forces that brought him into office.)

What the Republican Party as an institution needed more than anything after the George W. Bush years was some serious ideological self-examination. The Tea Party, for all its many faults, was at least in part an attempt to begin that process. But if the pundits are right, and the nomination is now inevitably going to Mitt Romney, that will not happen.

Romney is a man without any ideological core. There is no ideological there there. He will say or do anything to be president. In poll after poll, Republican voters say that they support him mostly because he is seen as the most electable, the most likely to defeat Obama. The fact that he does not truly stand for anything is secondary to the hope that he will vanquish their fictional "King Obama."

Already, voices on the right are crying out in despair. This week an editorial in the Wall Street Journal began: "Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose."

And the target of their ire is the ostensible candidate of Wall Street, Mitt Romney:

Thus the core difference between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama: For the governor, the convictions are the veneer. For the president, the pragmatism is. Voters always see through this. They usually prefer the man who stands for something.

Another voice from the right, of a more Tea Party bent, had this to say:

The Establishment could not have made a more strategic blunder. They will, in all likelihood, succeed in securing the nomination for Mitt Romney, but the damage they have inflicted upon themselves is approaching irreversible. The public now sees the length to which the Establishment will go to make certain their hand-picked candidate is chosen regardless of the dire circumstances facing the nation. 

Average Republican or conservative voters are the same people that buy the books or magazines or subscribe to the websites ... A number of them (how many is anyone's guess right now) will no longer be willing to support those factions within the Establishment and the Party or to believe what they are told. These are the people suffering the consequences of the disastrous policies pursued over previous decades, while those in the Establishment live lives of relative ease and comfort, which seems to be their primary concern.

The cracks are showing. For now, they are being papered over with posters bashing "King Obama." For all I know, given the hard economic times, that could be enough--for now.

Historian Michael Holt, the author of a comprehensive account of the Whigs, wrote:

the history of the Whig Party can best be understood in terms of a tension or balance between centrifugal forces that always threatened to tear it apart and the centripetal force of conflict with Democrats that held it together.

Under the strains of the polarized politics of the 1850s, the Whigs fell apart and disappeared.

Today, the Republicans are in no danger of disappearing, but they are being held together by their centripetal forces. Like the Whigs, they ignore the centrifugal forces of ideology at their peril.