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."

FDR Got Things Done. So Has Obama.

Sunday was a bad day for FDR in the New York Times Sunday Review section.

Ross Douthat, showing a level of understanding of the New Deal that I would find deficient in an undergraduate, used FDR to bash President Obama's decision to pursue health care reform. Bill Scher used FDR's allegedly cozy relationship with corporate heads to praise Obama. Both showed how little they understand about the politics of the 1930s.

Douthat's argument is that, despite the Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Obama was foolish to pursue it early in his first term--that choice, he says, was "disastrous." His evidence for that is that the legislation is "deeply unpopular." (Douthat never deigns to evaluate the actual merits of the legislation. Evidently that is not important--timing is all.)

Douthat says the law is unpopular not because people don't understand it (the usual Democratic argument) but because of the timing. See, people are just mad that Obama pushed this legislation before the economy improved enough. "By turning from economic crisis management to sweeping social legislation before the crisis had actually abated, Obama made himself look more ideological than practical and more liberal than pragmatic." Evidently Obama did this by pursuing a goal he had explicitly campaigned on (the nerve!) and by embracing Republican ideas (eschewing a public option and accepting the individual mandate instituted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts).

Douthat's points are self-evidently wrong on the surface, but he deepens his errors by claiming the authority of history. "This was not a mistake the icons of the liberal past made," he intones. "Franklin Roosevelt spent two years defining himself as a Depression fighter before he set out to establish Social Security."

To call this point simplistic would be an understatement.

FDR announced his intention to implement Social Security in June 1934, 15 months into his presidency. He signed it into law in August 1935, 29 months into his presidency.

Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, 14 months into his presidency. According to Douthat, 15 months is the difference between political success and political disaster. This is not an argument. It is an assertion without evidence or logic.

More to the point, Douthat's praise of FDR ignores the rather significant fact that FDR had hardly ended the Great Depression when he pushed for Social Security. In fact, he pushed it because the first New Deal had failed, recovery was sluggish, and he was under political pressure to do something, anything, so he could point to successes going into the 1936 election. FDR didn't push for Social Security because the "economic crisis" had passed, as Douthat implies, but because it hadn't.

Scher's argument is a little better. His point is that Obama is to be commended, not criticized, for working with corporate interests on health care. Obama has been unfairly criticized by liberals, Scher says, who neglect how much their heroes FDR and LBJ did the same thing.

It is true that, as Scher says, FDR "was quite adept at bargaining with corporations" in the First 100 Days. What he neglects to note is that the major policy he negotiated with business, the National Recovery Act, is almost universally considered an abject failure.

FDR's most notable successes came after he stopped trying to appease big business. He learned that his attempts to do so were futile, since they excoriated him anyway. By August 1934, they had formed the anti-FDR Liberty League and dedicated their efforts to defeating him in 1936. So much for "bargaining."

After business turned on him, FDR not only passed Social Security, but the Wagner Act (which established union rights) and the WPA (which created jobs for the unemployed). These liberal policies were passed over the objections of businessmen, not by compromise with them.

Scher's point, however, is still a reasonable one: "most of the time politics is exasperating and irritating, not euphoric and cathartic." That's true, and it is also true (though Scher doesn't note it) that FDR returned to a detente with business when American involvement in World War II loomed.

I have no idea whether FDR would have, in Obama's shoes, pushed for health care in his first year in office, or if he would have sought to appease drug companies and the Chamber of Commerce whenever he did it. What I do think I know is that he would be proud of Obama for having gotten it done.

FDR's commission on Social Security recommended including health insurance as part of that program, but FDR feared (probably correctly) that it would be too much for Congress to swallow.

But he did not give up on the idea. In January 1944, when he proposed his postwar political agenda, the "Economic Bill of Rights," he included the following: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health."

In short, we owe the very idea of health care as a right to FDR. Given that fact, and his own rather flexible approach to politics, I rather doubt he would care very much how--or when--Obama got it done. FDR got things done. So has Obama.

John Roberts and The Case of Dred Scott v. Madison

Last March, I wrote a post about the Court's consideration of the health care law. My point then was that it was possible for a judicial victory to turn into a political defeat. That could still be the case, if the Court's ruling upholding it motivates the conservative base that is so viscerally opposed to the Affordable Care Act. Already, in an echo of the reaction to the Brown v. Board decision, some in the blogosphere are calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts.

My major concern in the original post was that the Court's conservative wing would overreach, much like Roger Taney did in the Dred Scott decision in 1857. The temptation had to be great. The conservative movement is nearly unanimous in its rejection of the act, and even the so-called "moderate" swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, was prepared to throw out the entire law.

It seems, however, that John Roberts was sensitive to that danger. Certainly he could have sided with the four conservative justices in this case. But he didn't. Why?

My good friend Bill Carleton wrote the following in a comment to my original post:

What you say reminds me of a CSPAN documentary I just saw about the workings of the Supreme Court. The current Chief Justice, John Roberts, is heard in a voice over, as the camera pans the portraits of prior Chief Justices, remember the lesson of Taney - don't be THAT man.

It would seem that Roberts thought exactly that. Taney's overtly political decision tarnished the reputation of the Court for years. By avoiding a 5-4 decision in which all 5 votes to overturn the greatest achievement of a Democratic president came from justices appointed by Republican presidents, Roberts may have avoided becoming THAT man.

But as observers on the right and left have noted, he did so in a rather odd way--by effectively agreeing with the dissenters on many of the substantive points, particularly on the matter of the Commerce clause. Some people see this as a stealth attempt by Roberts to set the stage for more significant limitations on the power of Congress in the future.

George Will, for example, argues: "Conservatives won a substantial victory" in the case. Since reformers have used the Commerce clause to expand government power since the New Deal, the argument goes, Roberts has served the larger cause by putting limits on the use of the Commerce clause, which Will, of course, thinks is all to the good.

Pamela S. Karlan, writing in the New York Times, sees the same thing but from the opposite political perspective. Karlan fears that Roberts "laid down a cache of weapons that future courts can use to attack many of the legislative achievements of the New Deal and Great Society."

In short, the argument is that in exchange for allowing this law to stand (barring a political decision by a future president and Congress to repeal it), Roberts has established the ground work for a revolution in constitutional law that might limit significantly the power of Congress under the Commerce clause.

If this is indeed Roberts' game, then instead of pulling a Dred Scott, he decided to pull a Marbury v. Madison. In the latter, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the short-term interests of his political party, the Federalists. As Gordon Wood puts it in Empire of Liberty, Marshall's early tenure as Chief Justice showed "his strategy of retrenchment and conciliation and his genius for compromise while at the same time asserting the authority of the Court."

Federalists lost the bitter presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, but in the lame-duck session of Congress between the election and Jefferson's inauguration, the now-repudiated Federalist majority passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which outgoing President John Adams signed into law only weeks before he was to leave office. The law was a rather overt power grab--it created new circuit courts, and Adams immediately appointed Federalist judges to them. It was meant to preserve Federalist power in the judicial branch after the party had lost the Congress and the Presidency. In 1802, Jefferson's Republicans repealed the 1801 act.

In the meantime, one of the last-minute judges appointed by Adams, William Marbury, sued to receive his commission, which the new Republican administration had refused to deliver. Marshall was under a great deal of pressure. Federalists wanted him to rule that the Republican repeal of the 1801 act had been unconstitutional. Republicans warned that a blatantly political ruling by a Federalist judge would reveal the partisan nature of the Supreme Court and require Congressional action to rein it in.

Chief Justice John Marshall

Marshall's decision brilliantly solved his problem. He ruled that Marbury had a right to the commission, and that the Jefferson administration had no right to deny it to him.

So, Jefferson lost, right? Not really. Marshall also ruled that Marbury had based his petition for relief to the Court on a provision of the 1789 Judiciary Act, and that provision, Marshall said, was unconstitutional. Thus the Court had no power to order that Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Madison, deliver the commission.

So, Jefferson won, right? Not really. He thought the idea of judicial review was undemocratic, and said that if the Courts alone had the power to rule on constitutionality of laws, it "would make the judiciary a despotic branch." But since he had "won" the case on those grounds, Jefferson was put in the position of accepting--at least indirectly-- the validity of judicial review.

In the short run, Marshall gave the administration a political victory. In the long run, he established the precedent of judicial review, which is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, but is the greatest power the Court has. But not challenging the Jefferson administration directly, Marshall maintained the reputation of the Court and enhanced its power.

The parallels to what Roberts did last week are obvious. He too resisted the pressure of the political party that nominated him to the Court. He too handed that party a short-run defeat. He too (at least somewhat) rehabilitated the Court's reputation.

Whether or not he has also set the stage for a conservative judicial revolution, such as Will hopes for and Karlan fears, depends entirely on future Courts and future decisions.

But Roberts does seem to have decided--at least for now--that he'd rather be Marshall than Taney. We should all be grateful for that. But for George Will's hopes and Pamela Karlan's fears to be borne out, Roberts would have to some day pick up those judicial "weapons" and use them against the New Deal and Great Society.

For the record, though John Marshall effectively created the Court's power of judicial review, he served on the Court for more than 30 years after Marbury v. Madison and never used it to invalidate another law passed by the United States Congress. In fact, no Court used it for that purpose until 1857, when Roger Taney used it in the Dred Scott decision. Hopefully, John Roberts will remember that, too.

Scalia Really IS a Political Hack!

Six weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the overtly political (rather than constitutional) nature of Justice Antonin Scalia's questioning in oral arguments on the Arizona immigration law. Today, the Supreme Court handed down its decision, upholding the "papers, please" part of the law but striking down other parts involving state enforcement of federal law.

Scalia, to no one's surprise, dissented on the decision to strike down parts of the Arizona law. But he also went out of his way--this time in a written dissent-- to expose his political views. Referring to President Obama's recent decision to refrain from deporting certain young people brought into the country by their parents, Scalia introduced a completely irrelevant political observation: “The President said at a news conference that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration's proposed revision of the Immigration Act.7,” Scalia wrote. “Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so.”

The whole point is that it is not Arizona's place to decide on immigration. It is a federal responsibility. Scalia, who seems to be arguing that the states are sovereign entities and can police their own borders, rejects that constitutional principle. That strikes me as a bizarre view, but he is entitled to it.

In his opinion, however, he goes beyond that. Recall that the president's recent decision was not a subject of the case before the Court. To introduce it at all is entirely inappropriate. But even more inappropriate is what Scalia says about it. He questions the sincerity of the administration's explanation of its policy: “The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this,” he writes. Again, this is beside the point. Whether or not Scalia believes the administration's explanation for the policy is utterly irrelevant to the constitutionality of the Arizona law.

If Scalia would like to resign from the Court and run for office, he can question the motives of the administration all he likes. But to put such blatantly partisan arguments in a dissent shows how irredeemably political he is. He disapproves of the Obama administration's policies, so he wants Arizona to be able to act contrary to those policies.

We have reached a truly absurd point in the relationship between the Court and politics. The Republican Party, which has railed for decades against "activist judges" who "legislate from the bench" has no better representative of its political id than Antonin Scalia, a doctrinaire ideologue who routinely injects his personal political views into his decisions. He brazenly spouts partisan political arguments from the bench, all the while making the ridiculous claim that he is dedicated to the "original intent" of the Framers of the Constitution. But his words betray him. If you want to know what Scalia thinks, you would do better to watch Fox News than read the Constitution.

Fear Can Be Productive, Fearlessness Destructive

There is something different happening in this economic downturn. It's not just the fact that the recovery has been stubbornly slow, but the political response to it. For the first time in modern American history, conservatives have no fear of the social consequences of economic distress.

This is an unprecedented situation, and a dangerous one. It has turned one of the two political parties into an uncompromising, extremist faction blinded by ideology.

In his column in the New York Times last Friday, David Brooks argues that Republicans today are not extreme, they just have a different viewpoint: "many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes." Democrats, on the other hand, fail to see the writing on the wall and are simply re-arranging the deck chairs on the old Titanic.

The behavior of today's Republican Party is a problem for those like Brooks who see themselves as responsible conservatives. No reasonable person wants to defend the people who still question where the president was born, or the people in Michigan who put a sign saying "Obama Presidential Library" on a bullet-hole pocked outhouse last week, or even legislators who are willing to take the government to the brink of default.

So Brooks ignores that kind of embarrassing extremism and focuses instead on this big-picture "viewpoint" that he clearly views as much more intellectually respectable. The problem is this: the very viewpoint he identifies is also an extremist one.

Brooks implicitly suggests that the perception of extremism is due to the extremity of the situation: we are at a turning point in world history: the "welfare-state model" is dying. I would respond that we are now seeing the domestic economic and political consequences of a real turning point in world history that came over twenty years ago: the death of communism.

The limited welfare state in this country came into being as a response to two great crises of American capitalism--the depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. What we call the "welfare state" was initially the product of two large movements that followed those economic calamities: the Progressivism of the early 20th century and the New Deal.

In both cases, intelligent American political leaders had one central insight: the only way to preserve American capitalism from the threat of revolution was to reform it, to moderate it, to curb its worst excesses. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1912:

There is urgent necessity of applying both common sense and the highest ethical standard to this movement for better economic conditions among the mass of our people if we are to make it one of healthy evolution and not one of revolution.

Without reform, revolution was inevitable. The true conservative, TR knew, was a reformer.

The reformers of both eras knew there was something worse out there as a possibility: the specter of communism. That radical ideology gave disgruntled workers an alternative that promised a more just and equitable society. The wisest of the capitalists understood the threat this ideology represented, and more importantly, they knew that the only way to preserve capitalism was to reform and limit it. On some level, they were scared--but this was the good kind of scared, the kind that sees a real threat and responds to it rationally and reasonably, producing something better.

The result was a regulatory system that began modestly under TR with legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Hepburn Act (which empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission so that it could effectively regulate the railroad industry). Under FDR, the result was Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were designed (at least in part) to prevent future economic downturns from spiraling out of control. The New Deal also saw the creation of the SEC to regulate Wall Street and the Glass-Steagall Act to regulate the banks.

The result of all of this reform was the emergence of the United States as the great economic powerhouse of the mid-to-late 20th century.

What is different in this latest crisis of capitalism is that capitalists today are not scared of the "mass of our people." Ever since the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism 20 years ago, American conservatives have had no fear of social unrest, at home or abroad. They believe that there is no alternative for frustrated workers, so these reforms of the 20th century are no longer needed. They can turn back the clock on reforms they never really liked, ones they'd only grudgingly accepted as necessary to preserve social peace.

With nothing to fear, they have spent the last 20 years trying to undermine the regulatory state and the limited welfare state. They've deregulated the financial industries, repealed Glass-Steagal. They've repeatedly cut taxes to "starve the beast." They've encouraged the growing income disparity that has left the middle and lower classes stagnant or declining while the wealthiest accumulate ever-greater shares of the national wealth.

And when as a result it all came crashing down in 2008, they blamed not the tax cuts, not the increasing concentration of wealth at the very top, not the deregulation, not the banks, not the markets. Instead, they blamed the unions, people on unemployment, recipients of public assistance, government workers. The people they no longer feared, the people they've long seen as impediments to even greater profits and concentrations of wealth.

The Republican Party has, for the last three years, acted like people who think they hold all the cards. They don't need to compromise. The worse the economy gets, the better it is for them politically, the easier it becomes to scapegoat the government and administer the final death blows to the welfare state. They are not afraid.

Unlike smart conservatives in earlier ages, today's conservatives see no reason to curb the excesses of capitalism. Far from it. They rail against "Obamacare" despite the fact that it retains (and arguably subsidizes) the private insurance system and is dominated by conservative ideas of health insurance reform. They whine that the modest financial industry reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act mark the end of freedom.

More cruelly, rather than trying to take the edge off in tough times, they seem intent on sharpening the pain inflicted by the failings of the economic system.

Feeling no fear, seeing no need to reform, they are pressing what they see as their advantages--not only do they refuse to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, they are pushing for further cuts in tax rates that are already unusually low. Rather than bolster the protections against the vicissitudes of the economic system (like unemployment insurance and food stamps), they seek to diminish or remove them. Rather than make concessions to unions to help workers, they try to destroy them.

The argument (such as it is) that Brooks makes is that we cannot afford the "welfare-state model" anymore. In this perverse vision, government is so big that it has strangled capitalism (fact--there are 500,000 fewer federal government employees today than there were in 1980, though there are 82 million more Americans). Now the welfare state is too expensive, we can't afford it, it has outlived its usefulness, so now it has to go.

But the historical reality is different. Yes, undeniably, the modern welfare state would be impossible without the wealth creation of capitalism. But it was also the emergence of the regulatory state and the welfare state that made possible the continued growth of capitalism after its near self-destruction in the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s.

Without adequate regulation, without government policies to moderate its impact, free market capitalism produces socially destabilizing and destructive swings of boom and bust.

Smart conservatives in America's past knew that. Today, a precious few like David Frum occasionally try to pull conservatism back in that direction (e.g., reminding them that opposition to "Obamacare" is not enough, they need an alternative that addresses the problem of the uninsured).

But mostly, people like David Brooks, people who should know better, enable modern conservatism's short-sightedness by elevating it to a respectable "viewpoint" and ignoring its extremism.

It is extreme. It is short-sighted. It is stupid. And worst of all, it is self-destructive.

It used to be that conservatives were wise enough to fear extremism. Today, they embrace it.

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.

The Southern Strategy Lives

The semester is over at Wofford. Though I was on leave from my normal teaching duties, I did supervise the independent work of three students, one of whom (Jennifer Coggins) wrote an excellent honors thesis on Richard Nixon, the southern strategy, and school desegregation. For her, of course, Nixon was fairly distant history. For me, Nixon is memory. I always tell my students that Nixon is the first president I really remember and that the adult version of me is no more taken with him than the child version was, so they should take my mixture of memory and history with an appropriate grain of salt.

Last week brought a jarring reminder of the relevance of scholarly work like this thesis. In short (and I'm simplifying a 50 page argument), in the 1968 campaign, Nixon employed what has been called the "southern strategy" and the rhetoric used in the election had real consequences for Nixon administration policy regarding school integration.

The "southern strategy" was the attempt to exploit politically LBJ's full embrace of civil rights in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The thinking was that disaffected Democrats (especially, but not exclusively, from the south--think Archie Bunker) could be convinced to vote Republican by the used of racially coded rhetoric that would signal sympathy with their opposition to the civil rights movement.

South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond with
Richard Nixon during the 1968 campaign.

The trick, however, was to do so without being too obvious about it, since that ran the risk of alienating independents and Republicans who supported civil rights. So Nixon used phrases such as "law and order" which had no inherent racial meaning, but had become racially charged due to the rioting after Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968 and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panthers.

Choosing the right words, therefore, could send different messages to different audiences: opponents of civil rights could see a rebuke to the movement, while others could see a non-racial appeal for social stability in a tumultuous time.

Last Thursday, the New York Times ran a story about a proposed ad campaign, funded by a conservative billionaire named Joe Ricketts, to use Rev. Jeremiah Wright to try to discredit President Obama. Using Rev. Wright would not necessarily raise comparisons to Nixon's southern strategy. In fact, nothing in the Times article did for me. But the Times helpfully included a link to the entire proposed ad campaign document.

Title page of the memo by "Strategic Perceptions"

Being a historian, I welcomed the chance to read the primary source. Not surprisingly, the authors were aware of the potential racially charged nature of the proposed ad. To pre-empt any such charges, they proposed getting "an extremely literate, conservative African American in our spokesman group," as well as using focus groups to test how the ad came across. The focus group would help identify what might seem racist to viewers.

Again, nothing too overtly suggesting the southern strategy. In fact, for a moment, I thought that the idea was to insure that there was truly nothing racist about the ad. Then came the explanation that the focus group would help them in "making fine-tuning adjustments in wording and visuals to increase the impact, while lessening any elements that could reasonably be deemed 'racist.'"

"Lessening." In that one word, we see the essence of the southern strategy.

The paragraph begins with the assumption that the "instant response liberals give to any attack is to deem the attack as racist." But those are not the people the ad's authors care about. The perception that they are trying to influence is not that of knee-jerk, partisan liberals. The focus group is there to tell them what could reasonably be deemed racist.

They take as a given that the focus group may well think parts of the ad "could reasonably be deemed 'racist.'" And in response they would tweak the ad to lessen those elements.

Not "eliminate," but lessen.

As it was with the southern strategy, the concern is perception. The challenge is to use a racially charged attack and try to make it not look racist to people who will be offended by its racism. So you identify and lessen the racist elements. But you don't eliminate them, because that would defeat the purpose. You are also speaking to another audience, and they need to be able to perceive what will motivate them.

Four years ago, Rick Perlstein wrote a book called Nixonland, that argues that Nixon shaped the political world we now live in. That is probably an overstatement. But when it comes to the southern strategy, some people are clearly still living in Nixonland.