Tag: george wallace
Whatever Happens In Midterm, The MAGA Fantasy Isn't Coming True

Whatever Happens In Midterm, The MAGA Fantasy Isn't Coming True

So, here’s my question for the MAGA crowd, one of several related questions, actually: When was America last great, and what was great about it? Also, when did it quit being great, and why?

To a skeptical observer, it often looks as if restoring the social and political arrangements of, say, Alabama in the 1950s is the movement’s goal. Black people and women in their subservient places, white Protestant men ascendant, and the Cisco Kid and Pancho the only brown people in sight.

To be fair, it’s more the Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show most of them probably have in mind: more Opie, Aunt Bee, and Barney Fife than Gov. George Wallace and Birmingham’s racial enforcer Bull Connor. Nobody really imagines that racial segregation and police riots are coming back.

For most people, those halcyon days ended at about age twelve, around the time they started reading newspapers, watching TV news, and grokking the adult world. In childhood, life seemed simple, violence and disorder unknown. I can never hear The Judds' saccharine song Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days) on the country oldies station without thinking of Alabama’s hillbilly genius Hank Williams.

The song evokes a bygone era of innocence when “families really bowed their heads to pray/Daddies never went away.” Meanwhile, Hank Williams’ heartbroken songs about drinking, sinning, and running around evoked the world as it was. Grandpa knew, but the children of Mayberry had no idea.

Too many still don’t. Hence MAGA, a fantasy.

That’s an even more roundabout way than usual of saying that regardless of which political party prevails in the November 2022 congressional elections, it would be foolhardy to expect dramatic change of the kind MAGA enthusiasts think they want. They can cheer all they want for a gangster former president who basically called in a hit on his own running mate, but the deck remains stacked against them.

First, it’s not yet clear that Trump is going to get away with it. Should upcoming hearings by the House Select Committee on January 6 prove even halfway as shocking as predicted—a former GOP congressman working as an investigator for the committee describes the evidence as “absolutely stunning”—all Fox News’s horses and all of its men won’t l be able to save him. Also, the former president may yet face criminal indictment, if not by the Justice Department, then by a Georgia district attorney investigating his attempts to strong-arm the state’s electoral process.

A lot can happen between now and Election Day to upset Republicans’ expectations. Should the Supreme Court, as expected, overturn Roe vs Wade, in effect rendering women of childbearing age vassals of the state, voters could turn strongly against them. Many Democratic strategists favor making the 2022 election a referendum on abortion rights, an issue strong enough to overcome voter frustration over inflation and gasoline prices.

“Give us the House and two more senators,” writer Josh Marshall suggests Democrats should say, “and we will make Roe law in January 2023.”

Not that the Republicans have put forward serious plans for dealing with economic woes. Given the customary level of voter superstition that holds the sitting president and his party responsible for things over which they have almost no control—inflation and high energy costs are rampant worldwide—they may not think they need to.

But regardless of what happens in November, the real impediments to making MAGA daydreams come true are the Senate filibuster—the very thing that has stymied the Biden administration’s legislative goals--and equally decisive, the presidential veto.

“No one at the White House will say this out loud, certainly,” veteran political reporter Matt Bai writes in the Washington Post, “but the fact is that losing control of the House (and possibly the Senate) in November would instantly make the presidency a more manageable job.”

Certain aggravating congressional Democrats would lose their megaphones. Also, the last two Democratic presidents to lose control of Congress in mid-term elections were Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010. Confronting Rep. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Clinton issued 17 vetoes over the next two years, including most significantly in this context, a GOP bill banning so-called “partial-birth abortions.”

Clinton also faced-down a Republican-led government shutdown in the winter of 1995-96 and ended up being re-elected easily the following November.

For his part, President Obama too fought off numerous Republican attempts to repeal his signature Affordable Care Act and won easy re-election. Give these MAGA cranks “a couple of years to show us what kind of government they have in mind,” Matt Bai thinks, "and Biden will look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison.”

My own view is that although he really can’t say so until 2023, Joe Biden probably won’t run for re-election, and shouldn’t. Putting Trumpism on life support is a sufficient lifetime political accomplishment. It’s long-past time for generational change at the top of the Democratic Party.

Excerpt: ‘American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election And The Politics Of Division’

Excerpt: ‘American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election And The Politics Of Division’

The 2016 campaign may look like the craziest campaign in modern political history. But we’ve been here before. Forty-eight years ago, another racist demagogue who “told it like it is”; played on white racial anxieties and pledged to bring law and order to America ran for president. Alabama governor George Wallace might have run on a third party ticket that year – and only ended up winning 13 percent of the popular vote – but he gave Republican politicians a blueprint for how to use racial and cultural fear and anti-government populism to their political benefit.  Wallace’s rhetorical appeals in 1968 would become the template for a generation of Republicans and can be heard directly in the campaign musings of this year’s Wallace-like figure, Donald Trump. Indeed, by the fall of 1968 Wallace was running a strong third in the polls, nipping at the heels of Hubert Humphrey and seemed to poise to potentially win enough states to stop any candidate from winning a majority of electoral votes and thus throw the 1968 election into the House of Representatives. 

Then he picked his vice presidential running mate, General Curtis Lemay, and practically overnight, the bottom fell out of his presidential campaign. This adapted excerpt from Michael A. Cohen’s recent book American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division tells the story of perhaps the most disastrous campaign press conference in modern American history – a story that will likely sound very familiar to those who have followed this year’s wacky and seemingly unending presidential campaign.

By the first days of October 1968, George Wallace had reached the apex of his political rise. Featured on the covers of Life, Time, and Newsweek, Wallace, according to the New York Times led in seven states versus only four for Humphrey. His campaign rallies remained as enthusiastic, well-attended, and unruly as ever — twenty thousand greeted him at Boston Commons (far more than Humphrey turned out), and thirteen thousand in Fort Worth. The overflow crowds lapped up his paeans to the policeman and the firefighter, the beautician and the truck driver and his harsh attacks on the anarchists, the hippies, and the meddling, liberal elite. Angry and bigoted taunting of reporters and demonstrators as well as fisticuffs between pro- and anti-Wallace forces was the norm.

As his poll numbers began topping 20 percent Wallace suddenly became a major political problem for both parties. Humphrey worried about Wallace eroding his support among blue-collar workers. Nixon feared losing the votes of disaffected and resentful whites –people who without Wallace in the race were likely to vote Republican. So Nixon soon followed Humphrey’s lead in attacking Wallace.

Nothing the two candidates did, however, could match Wallace’s own self-sabotage in his choice of a running mate. All else being equal, Wallace would have preferred to run alone, but many states required a vice presidential candidate to be on the ballot with him. Wallace’s close aides wanted a national figure, someone who might lend credibility to the ticket while also extending their electoral possibilities outside the Deep South and into places like Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia. A. B. (Happy) Chandler, the one-time commissioner of Major League Baseball and former governor and senator from Kentucky, seemed like the perfect candidate.

Wallace, however, was unconvinced. “Well, you know, that fellow’s liberal now . . . . He’s the one . . . that integrated baseball.” Chandler’s tenure had indeed coincided with the breaking of the color barrier by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. As governor of Kentucky he had mobilized the National Guard to protect black students integrating previously segregated schools. Further complicating matters, Chandler was unrepentant in his pro–civil rights positions.

As speculation mounted that he would get the vice presidential nod, Chandler told reporters, “I wouldn’t change my record if I could.” Sure enough, as Chandler’s name began to leak, Wallace’s backers publicly denounced the pick.

Wallace quickly reversed course: Chandler was out. He instead turned toward a candidate whose name had floated around the campaign for several weeks — General Curtis LeMay. Wallace, who believed that a military man would appeal to soldiers and veterans, could hardly have done much better than LeMay. During World War II and later as chief of staff of the air force, he became an infamous and, in some circles, heroic military figure. His decision to fire-bomb Japanese cities had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians but also helped to short-circuit an invasion of the Japanese mainland by American troops. In 1948 he had led the successful Berlin airlift during the Soviet siege of the city, and he had enshrined the nation’s nuclear deterrent capabilities as head of the StrategicAir Command.

With his square jaw; gruff, no-nonsense manner; and uncompromising views on the use of military force, he represented the ultimate foreign policy hawk.

LeMay, however, had one glaring liability. When it came to the use of American military force, he was something of a nut. “If you have to go [to war], you want LeMay in the lead bomber,” John F. Kennedy said. “But you never want LeMay deciding whether or not you have to go.” Practically no man in American public life spoke more loudly about the benefits of air power — and countenanced the use of nuclear weapons — than LeMay.

Indeed, in the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, director and cowriter Stanley Kubrick used him as a model for the flamboyant and hawkish General Buck Turgidson. Unlike Wallace, LeMay was neither a segregationist nor a doctrinaire conservative, but on war and in particular the use of nuclear power he was practically an evangelist. Unsurprisingly, then, even though Wallace’s aides warned LeMay over and over against raising the nuclear issue when preparing for his introductory press conference in Pittsburgh on October 3, LeMay could not leave well enough alone.

It took only one question after Wallace had introduced the general to the assembled reporters and the millions watching on live television to light the firestorm. As a potential vice president, one reporter asked, “What do you feel your experience can bring to the solution of the nation’s domestic problems . . . and secondly, as a potential President, what would be your policy in the employment of nuclear weapons?” Unsurprisingly, LeMay chose to answer the second question first. “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons,” he replied. “I think to most military men that a nuclear weapon is just another weapon in our arsenal. . . . I think there are many occasions when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.” With the first words out of his mouth, LeMay had already begun to self-destruct.

After playing down the contamination risks that came from nuclear testing, LeMay argued that while nuclear war would indeed be horrible, “It doesn’t make much difference to me if I have to get killed in the jungle of Vietnam with a rusty knife or get killed with a nuclear weapon. As a matter of fact if I had the choice I’d lean toward the nuclear weapon.” Many Americans at home likely preferred a third option, dying not by a corroded blade or an atom bomb. His efforts at reassurance did little to help. “I don’t believe the world would end if we exploded a nuclear weapon,” he told the increasingly slack-jawed reporters, cheerfully noting that after viewing films of Bikini Atoll, which had been the site of numerous nuclear tests, he had become convinced that people were not only exaggerating the dangers but also downplaying the positive side of nuclear weapons. “The fish are all back in the lagoons; the coconut trees are growing coconuts; the guava bushes have fruit on them; the birds are back.” Even the rats had become “bigger, fatter, and healthier than they were ever before.”

Ed Ewing, a Wallace press aide, recalled that when he looked over at his boss, he had “never seen anybody angrier in his life.” An ashen-looking Wallace finally edged up to the microphones. He tried to nudge LeMay aside to clarify matters. “General LeMay hasn’t advocated the use of nuclear weapons, not at all. He discussed nuclear weapons with you. He’s against the use of nuclear weapons and I am too.” It was true LeMay hadn’t actually called for the use of nukes in Vietnam — yet. But the reporters were not about to let LeMay off that easy. Jack Nelson, of the Los Angeles Times, kept pushing the point. “If you found it necessary to end the war, you would use them, wouldn’t you?” LeMay rose to the bait. “If I found it necessary, I would use anything that we could dream up . . . including nuclear weapons, if it was necessary.”

Again Wallace tried to correct the record. LeMay preferred to use no weapon, he said, but if the “security of the country depended on the use of nuclear weapons,” he would, like any national politician, counsel that they be used. Wallace began to walk away from the microphone, assuming – or perhaps hoping — the press conference had finally come to a merciful end.

But the general was not done. “I know that I’m going to come out with a lot of misquotes from this campaign,” said LeMay, demonstrating for the first time that morning actual self-awareness. “And I’ll be damn lucky if I don’t appear as a drooling idiot whose only solution to any problem is to drop atomic bombs all over the world.”

The damage had been done. “Anyone who can speak so lightly about the use of nuclear weapons has no conception of the reality of their terror,” said Humphrey. Henry Reuss, a Democratic congressman from Wisconsin, more directly captured the sentiments of many. He called LeMay a “Neanderthal.” Even Nixon hit the Wallace-LeMay ticket for its “irresponsibility and excessively hawkish attitudes.”

LeMay’s selection had been intended to boost Wallace’s standing on national security; instead, it reminded voters of the man they had rejected four years earlier, Barry Goldwater.

The Wallace camp tried to argue that the general’s words had been blown out of proportion, but they were so desperate to get LeMay away from reporters that they sent him on a “fact-finding” mission to Vietnam. In the airport in San Francisco, as he prepared to board a flight to the Far East, LeMay was cornered by reporters and somehow found himself saying that China never would have gotten involved in the Korean War had it not been for “traitors” in the United States. “Who are those traitors?” LeMay was asked. “You know who they are as well as I do,” he snapped.

Days after returning from his mission he gave a speech at Yale on environmental conservation, an issue, oddly, that was close to his heart. Though the address would be well received, news headlines were dominated by LeMay’s statement in the question-and-answer period that he favored both birth control and abortion, comments sure to go over badly in the working-class Catholic enclaves in the North on which Wallace increasingly relied.

LeMay’s constant gaffes threw Wallace back on his heels. Compounding his problems, at virtually the same time as the disastrous Pittsburgh press conference, America’s labor unions launched a massive campaign highlighting Wallace’s antilabor record in Alabama.

In the end, Wallace became his own worst enemy. For four years he had reaped political benefit from campaign rallies that teetered on the brink of full-scale riots. After a while the disorder and chaos made him seem less like the man who could clean up America’s problems and more like the person partly responsible for them. Wallace, who once reveled in the abuse he took from hecklers, began looking increasingly haggard and even frightened by the barrage of abuse being hurled at him on the stump. His frustration soon showed. “You’re a little punk,” he growled at one demonstrator. In San Diego, protesters who took the satirical approach of screaming “We Want War” drowned out his remarks. At a rally in Texas, demonstrators yelling “Sieg Heil” were so loud and persistent that he had to leave the stage without finishing his speech. In New Mexico schoolchildren booed him. When he did speak he complained that reporters were distorting his words and claimed that polls showing his numbers slipping had been “rigged by the Eastern Establishment moneyed interests.”

Though Wallace pressed on, his candidacy was clearly in decline. The combination of his own excesses; the counterattacks from Humphrey, Nixon, and labor; and the traditional skepticism that third-party candidates generally receive at the tail end of presidential elections slowed his momentum. The race had become a two-man battle between a newly reinvigorated Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, whose efforts to run out the clock were slowly beginning to unravel.

Michael A. Cohen is a national political columnist for The Boston Globe and a frequent contributor on politics and American foreign policy. Excerpted from American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division by Michael A. Cohen with permission from Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2016.

If you enjoyed this selection, purchase the full book here.

What I Believed Monday, I Will Still Believe Wednesday — No Matter What I Said Tuesday

What I Believed Monday, I Will Still Believe Wednesday — No Matter What I Said Tuesday

There are three major political parties in the United States: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the Trumpeter Party.

The Republicans blow their horns for the rich. The Democrats blow their horns for the poor. And the Trumpeters just blow.

While the Republicans and Democrats are very angry, the Trumpeters are furious. The other two parties are looking for a winner. The Trumpeters are looking for a savior.

This savior will find an enemy to blame for America’s woes. This enemy will have dark skin and a foreign accent and will not be a “true” American, no matter what his (probably phony) birth certificate says.

The savior will have a message. And it will not be unique. Andrew Jackson did pretty well with it in 1832, and a century later, it still had not lost its power. “Every man a king!” Huey Long told crowds in Louisiana in the early 1930s. “That’s my slogan.”

In February 1976, I interviewed George Wallace in the white, working-class neighborhood of Southie in Boston. Five hundred people packed into a small hall, and 300 more waited outside. Wallace spoke for nearly an hour in a strong, resonating voice.

“You will be the kings and queens of American politics!” Wallace thundered. “You! The working men and women will be the kings and queens instead of the ultraliberal left that has been getting everything all the time. Paul Revere rode to say the British were coming. I will ride to say, ‘The people are coming!'”

After his speech, Wallace took questions from the same reporters he had denounced during his speech. Like Trump, Wallace was not afraid of the press. Like Trump, Wallace used the press.

I asked Wallace what his strategy was.

“My strategy? I put down the hay where the goats can get it,” he said, and then he roared with laughter.

Trump is no different in that he does not have to sell his policies. His followers are more than ready for someone who will feed their fears and promise them magic, such as walls that will reach to the sky and be paid for by the same foreigners who want American jobs.

Trump does not need to build a coalition. The coalition is already out there festering, hating government, believing in conspiracies, waiting for someone to focus their anger.

On Tuesday, Ted Cruz woke up and decided to tell people that Trump is a really, really bad guy.

Trump is a “pathological liar” who is “utterly amoral” and does not know right from wrong, Cruz said. Trump has had “venereal diseases” as a result of his “serial philandering,” of which he is proud.

Trump is “terrified of strong women,” Cruz said.

And here is the really bad one: “He’s not going to build a wall.”

No wall? What the heck are we going to spray-paint?

Why did Cruz wait so long to roll out Operation Desperation? This is anybody’s guess. On April 26, after Trump swept Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, Stephen Colbert summed it up with deadly accuracy: “Trump’s candidacy just got five states less funny.”

And Hillary Clinton is not going to dawdle. Though technically she still has to beat Bernie Sanders, she is already ready for Trump. She is fired up and ready to go.

“We’ve seen a lot of rhetoric. We’ve seen a lot of insults,” she said Tuesday. “We’re going to have a tough campaign against a candidate who will literally say or do anything.”

The trouble with attacks against Trump, however, is that they usually lack the snap and verve of his own attacks.

Lyin’ Ted. Liddle Marco. Low-energy Jeb. Crooked Hillary.

As childish as they are, they stick in the mind.

“Ted Cruz does not have the temperament to be president of the United States,” Trump said Tuesday.

But what kind of temperament does the presidency require except a commitment to repeat the same slander day after day. “What I believed on Monday, I will still believe on Wednesday,” the candidate must say, “no matter what I believed on Tuesday.”

And when media outlets started writing a few weeks ago that Trump was dialing down his attacks to appear more presidential, Trump reacted with anger.

“I’m not changing. You know, I went to the best schools. I’m, like, a very smart person,” he said. “I don’t want to really change my personality. I think, you know, it got me here. … I consider myself the presumptive nominee. … As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

And as for the rest of the campaign? The remaining primaries, the conventions, the presidential debates and all those speeches?

No worries. It’s easy when you have a plan, and Donald Trump has a plan: He is just going to keep putting down the hay where the goats can get it.

Roger Simon is Politico’s chief political columnist. His new e-book, “Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America,” can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes. To find out more about Roger Simon and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters. 

Carson’s Bias Against Muslims Breaks Unwritten Rule Of Using Veiled Language

Carson’s Bias Against Muslims Breaks Unwritten Rule Of Using Veiled Language

By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

When Republican Ben Carson declared Muslims unfit to be president, he crossed a line that historians say no major White House hopeful has breached since the 1940s — openly expressing prejudice.

Carson is not the first to appeal to voter bias, but he broke with a timeworn tradition of using coded language to avert political backlash.

“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sept. 20. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”

Carson’s disparagement of Muslims came after months of derogatory remarks about women and Mexicans by rival Donald Trump, who nonetheless has remained the front-runner for the party nomination. Carson is in second place, some polls show.

Some Republican leaders, already worried about Trump’s insults, fear that Carson’s denigration of Muslims will further damage the party’s efforts to expand its base beyond older, conservative white voters.

Civil rights groups and some of Carson’s Republican rivals denounced the retired neurosurgeon, but he stands little risk of harm in the primaries. A 2013 survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants — a key group for Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist — believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.

Historian Thomas S. Kidd, author of “American Christians and Islam,” said Carson was capitalizing on fear of Muslim terrorists. “But then to turn it into a blanket statement that Muslims in general can’t be full participants in the life of the republic — I do think that’s significant, and it’s alarming,” Kidd said.

Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett said the comments were justified because Islam calls for killing gay people (Muslim clerics say that’s untrue), and that’s incompatible with the Constitution (the Constitution says “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”).

Bennett also said that Carson, as an African-American, “dramatically expands the appeal of the Republican Party.”

Carson later said on CNN that a Muslim would “have to reject the tenets of Islam” to be president.

Presidential candidates typically take pains to avoid showing religious bias. When Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran in 2008 and 2012, some evangelical Christians were hostile toward his faith. One of his 2008 opponents, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, apologized to Romney for asking a reporter, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to reassure Protestants that he would not take orders from the pope. But his main opponents, Hubert Humphrey in the primaries and Republican Richard Nixon in the general election, avoided the topic.

“Humphrey certainly didn’t say anything like what Carson said,” Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek recalled. Nixon didn’t need to stoke doubts about Kennedy’s faith because “there were plenty of people who were doing it for him,” he said.

Since World War II, historians say, the most openly prejudiced presidential candidate was Strom Thurmond, whose racism was unvarnished when he ran in 1948 as an independent.

“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” the South Carolinian said.

Alabama Gov. George Wallace, then a Democrat, was nearly as direct in his 1963 inaugural speech, pledging “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” But in his 1964 campaign for president, he was more guarded in appealing to whites outside the South at a time when many were uneasy about a new housing discrimination ban that would enable blacks to move into their neighborhoods.

“You may want to sell your house to someone with blue eyes and green teeth, and that’s all right,” he told a Maryland audience. “I don’t object. But you should not be forced to do it.”

After Romney’s loss in 2012, Republicans vowed to work harder to attract minority voters. The Republican National Committee released a scathing postmortem saying that “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

But Trump and Carson are benefiting from the uneasiness of many working-class whites as the nation becomes more diverse.
Their statements alarm strategist Henry Barbour, a co-author of the RNC report.

“When you say a Muslim’s not fit to be president of the United States, you’re a whole lot more than off message,” he said. “We need to stand on principle, but we don’t need to try to run folks off because they have different backgrounds than some traditional Republicans.”

Photo: U.S. Republican candidate Dr. Ben Carson speaks during the Heritage Action for America presidential candidate forum in Greenville, South Carolina September 18, 2015. (REUTERS/Chris Keane)