Sargent Shriver R.I.P.

Yesterday brought the sad news of the passing of R. Sargent Shriver (more remembrances here and here).  Best known for his work in the creation and leading of the Peace Corps, his direction of LBJ's War on Poverty, and for his tireless work for Special Olympics, Shriver also played a crucial role in several elections, both as a candidate and a confidante.  I'm going to devote a couple posts to Shriver, someone who I was vervy fortunate to meet while in college and who was inspirational to me in a lot of ways.

The first electoral episode that I want to explore relates to Shriver's role in the 1960 Kennedy campaign.  As brother in law to then candidate Kennedy, Shriver played an active role in many aspects of the campaign--delegate courting, position development, and especially working the important Illinois operation given Shriver's close ties to Chicago as head of the Merchandise Mart and positions on numerous boards and community organizations.  Most importantly, Shriver was the head of the campaign's Civil Rights section.  One thing that I think a lot of people take for granted is up until this point the African American vote was not as monolithically Democratic as it is today, nor was it as important to candidates' electoral college math.  Prior to FDR's ability to pull black voters into the New Deal Coalition, African Americans--dating back to Lincoln and Reconstruction--had strong GOP sympathies.  Furthermore, prior to the Great Migrations around World War I and II, the blacks (with few if any voting rights) tended to be heavily concentrated in the already solid Democratic deep south.  Thus, by the time of the 1960 election, Democratic candidates were becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the growing northern black vote, especially in close elections.  The peril of courting this vote however, was that it endangered upsetting southern whites whose votes were also crucial to victory.

Here is where Shriver played a crucial role in Kennedy's election.  In Theodore White's magisterial "The Making of the President 1960," he recounts Kennedy's deft decision, orchestrated by Shriver, to swing large numbers of black voters to the Kennedy ticket, thus helping ensure his narrow victory.  I'll quote at length:

The most interesting and precise of the decisions of this period, however, was one made by the candidate himself--particularly as it contrasted with the simultaneous Nixon decision on the same problem.  This concerned the Martin Luther King affair--an episode that tangled conscience with the most delicate balancing of the Northern Negro--Southern white vote.

Martin Luther King is one of the genuine heroes of the tumultuous Negro struglle for authentic equality in American life; a luminous man, he speaks responsibly for the best there is in his community.  On Wednesday, October 19th--at about the same time of the day that John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were addressing the American Legion in Miami on the national defense--Martin Luther King was arrested with fifty-two other Negroes in Rich's Department Store in Atlanta for refusing to leave a table in its Magnolia Room restaurant.  On the following Monday, all other "sit-ins" arrested in this episode were released; King alone was held in jail and, worse, sentenced on a technicality to four months' hard labor and thereupon whisked away secretly to the State Penitentiary.  This was no ordinary arrest--no Negro in America has more deservedly earned greater warmth and adoration from his fellow Negroes, North or South, than Martin Luther King; but no Negro menaces the traditional prerogatives of Southern whites more importantly.  It was not beyond possibility that he would never emerge alive from Reidsville State Prison, deep in "cracker" country, where he had been taken; nor did anyone believe more in the prospect of his lynching than his wife, then six months pregnant...The American Negro community girded; so did Southern whites; during the previous few weeks, even before the arrest, no less than three Southern governors had informed Kennedy headquarters directly that if he intruded in Southern affairs to support or endorse Martin Luther King, then the South could be given up as lost to the Democratic ticket.  Now Kennedy must choose.  This was a crisis.

The crisis was instantly recognized by all concerned with the Kennedy campaign.  On the night of Tuesday, October 25th, the suggestion for meeting it was born to one of those remarkably competent young men that the Kennedy organization had brought into politics to direct the Civil Rights Section of their campaign, a Notre Dame law professor named Harris Wofford.  Wofford's idea was as simple as it was human--that the candidate telephone directly to Mrs. King in Georgia to express his concern.  Desperately Wofford tried to reach his own chief, Sargent Shriver, head of the Civil Rights Section of the Kennedy campaign, so that Shriver might break through to the candidate while barnstorming somewhere in the Middle West.  Early Wednesday morning, Wofford was able to locate Shriver, the gentlest and warmest of the Kennedy clan (he had married Eunice Kennedy, the candidate's favorite sister) in Chicago--and Shriver enthusiastically agreed.  Moving fast, Shriver reached the candidate at O'Hare Inn at Chicago's International Airport as the latter was preparing to leave for a day of barnstorming in Michigan.

The candidate's reaction to Wofford's suggestion of participation was impulsive, direct and immediate.  From his room at the Inn, without consulting anyone, he placed a long distance telephone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, assured her of his interest and concern for her suffering and, if necessary, his intervention.

Mrs. King, elated yet still upset, informed a few of her closest friends.  Through channels of Negro leadership, the word swiftly spread from Atlanta, and thus to the press, that Kennedy had intervened to protect the imprisoned Negro leader.  And Bobby Kennedy, informed in the course of the day of the command decision, proceeded even further and the next morning telephoned a plea for King's release from New York to the Georgian judge who had set the sentence; on Thursday King was released from Reidsville prison on bail, pending appeal--safe and sound.

The entire episode received only casual notice from the generality of American citizens in the heat of the last three weeks of the Presidential campaign.  But in the Negro community the Kennedy intervention rang like a carillon.  The father of Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister himself, who had come out for Nixon a few weeks earlier on religious grounds, now switched.  "Because this man," said the Reverend Mr. King, Senior, "was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law's eyes, I've got a suitcase of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap."  Across the country scores of Negro leaders, deeply Protestant but even more deeply impressed by Kennedy's action, followed suit.  And where command decision had been made, the Kennedy decision could follow through.  Under Wofford's direction a million pamphlets describing the episode were printed across the country, half a million in Chicago alone, whence they were shipped by Greyhound bus.  On the Sunday before election, these pamphlets were distributed outside Negro churches across the country.  One cannot identify in the narrowness of American voting of 1960 any one particular episode or decision as being more important than any other in the final tallies: yet when one reflects that Illinois was carried by only 9,000 votes and that 250,000 Negroes are estimated to have voted for Kennedy; that Michigan was carried by 67,000 votes and that an estimated 250,000 Negroes voted for Kennedy; that South Carolina was carried by 10,000 votes and that an estimated 40,000 Negroes there voted for Kennedy, the candidate's instictive decision must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.

Next time...Shriver is tapped, belatedly, as George McGovern's running mate in 1972.

Riposte to My Last Post--ElectionDissection.com Book Club

After my last post I got to wondering whether I was being a little hard on the Palmetto State. Pulling out V.O. Key when talking about the south (and race) is certainly heavy artillery, but his conclusions--while valid in 1949--may no longer hold. So we should maybe look at more recent history. To help with this, I recently came across a book that was specifically designed to be an update of Key's "Southern Politics." From the title you get a sense that the authors wanted to take another look, state by state, at what Key explored. "The Transformation of Southern Politics," written by Jack Bass and Walter DeVries shows how, in the years after Key, two party politics began to emerge across the south. Whereas Key found factionalism within the solidly Democratic south to be the traditional form of politics, we here start to see the makings of more "rational" competition between the parties.

I should note, though, that this book was written in 1976 so we don't have the opportunity to explore the full arc of southern political transformation to the point where the region is now the most Republican part of the country. Indeed, in many of the states Bass and DeVries explore, parity between the parties had yet to emerge by the mid-70's. Nonetheless, the process was under way, spurred by several events and forces. Among these was the 1949 Dixiecrat revolt, Barry Goldwater's 1964 inroads in Dixie, as well as a social transformation that saw a massive in-migration into the south from many northern states. While these forces tended to help Republicans, Democrats also saw their politics transform--and this is a process the authors focus on. With the 1965 Voting Rights Act's passage, southern politicians could no longer ignore the numerical strength of black voters. In fact, they now had the incentive to court them. Thus, the 60's and 70's saw the emergence of many Democratic politicians who were much more moderate, and indeed sometimes progressive, on the issue of race in comparison to their predecessors. Jimmy Carter is probably the best example but lesser known figures like Ernest Hollings in South Carolina, Dale Bumpers in Arkansas, and Reubin Askew in Florida saw their rise assisted by black votes. Another consequence of the Voting Rights Act's passage, along with the breakup of malapportioned state legislative districts, was the election of sizable numbers of black politicians. Thus, Key's "Southern Politics" is very much in recession by this time.


In their chapter on South Carolina titled "The Changing Politics of Color," Bass and DeVries suggest that the state's politics, along with Tennessee's, were the furthest along in developing a true two party system. The responsibility for the growth and early maturation of SC's Republicans can be most ascribed to Strom Thurmond. After first bolting the Democrats to run as a Dixiecrat in 1948, Thurmond joined the Republican ranks and was elected to the Senate. One story that I found fascinating in Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" was the role that Thurmond played in the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. By providing affirmation of Nixon's bona fides (some would call this a wink and a nod to the "Southern Strategy"), Nixon was able to win South Carolina, not only denying it to George Wallace who swept the rest of the Deep South, but helping to cement his victory over Hubert Humphrey.

While South Carolinian, and southern politics more broadly, was changing, that's not to say that some of the characteristics Key identified had disappeared. Voting could still be very racially polarized. In his recent look at southern politics, Thomas Schaller argues that white southern voters oftentimes increase their participation in response to high levels of black voting--in other words, the fear that black voters could tilt elections leads whites to vote in reaction to them (and thus for Republicans). Bass and DeVries found a similar phenomenon in South Carolina:

A look at county data reveals, as expected, that the combination of heavy black population and a high rate of black participation greatly stimulates white political participation. Whites in all 12 of the majority black counties were registered at a higher percentage than the state average of 61.3 percent. In ten of the counties the white registration rate was more than 15 points higher than the statewide rate. As a percentage of those registered, whites in the majority black counties voted at a slightly higher rate than the state average, and blacks in those counties at a rate about equal to the state average.

Thus, there's a mixture of both fluidity and stability in the politics of the south. What we need to look at next is the subsequent chapter of southern political history--the rise of Reagan, the maturation of the Republican Party across the region, and its subsequent dominance epitomized in the 1994 congressional election. Bass and DeVries have updated the version that I have so that is probably the best place to start but I'll try and search out some more works, comprehensive in scope, to continue this process of exploration.

What the Wilderness Looks Like

For the past several posts, John and I have been spending a bit of time writing about the current state of the Conservative Movement. With the results of the past two elections showing a clear trend in the Democrats’ direction, aided not only by the failures of the Bush administration, but also by demographic and cultural shifts—see Teixeira and Judis—a lot of ink is now being spent debating how the Republicans, and conservatives more broadly, should respond. Do they move leftward and try to recapture some of the vast middle ceded to Obama (thus potentially alienating the conservative base) or do they retrench at the right flank and hope that events bring the electorate back in their direction? While many on the right argue that we are a “center-right” country by temperament, a misreading of the country’s pulse and preferences could spell disaster over the medium and long term. Hence, whether or not the right has a true leader—hence the current kerfuffle about Rush Limbaugh’s place in the conservative pantheon—they seem to be in wilderness mode.
While two election cycles don’t necessarily mean the country is on an irreversible move leftward, I thought I’d look a bit at the last time the country was moving strongly in one direction. Here, however, the move was to the right. If what is happening now is of the same magnitude and duration, Republicans are in for a long period of soul-searching and electoral defeat. My decision to look at where conservatives find themselves was spurred by today’s announcement that Al From, the founder and longtime head of the Democratic Leadership Council, is stepping down as head of the organization. The DLC was created in the midst of the Democrats’ last long period of exile. The goal of the organization, simply stated, was to make the Democrats relevant again. As liberalism reached its nadir in the 1970’s & 1980’s following the collapse of the Great Society, the “big government” solution to policy problems was thrown into disrepute. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were able to capitalize on the excesses of the 1960’s and America’s fear and loathing of rising crime, growing welfare dependency, and affirmative action and bring about a re-ordering of the American polity. The result?? Republicans won 5 of the 6 presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.

To get a sense of just how bad the Democrats’ period of exile was, consider the five elections between 1972 and 1988. With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s Watergate-aided win in 1976, the Republicans not only won all of these contests but won them handily. Here is the Electoral College vote in each of the contests. Overall, Republicans won 2200 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 487—82% of the total. Note how in 3 of these elections (’72, ’80, and ’84) Republicans won more electoral votes in a single contest than the Democrats won in total over all 5!!! While the Democrats managed to maintain majorities in the House and Senate (with the exception of ’81-’87) the party’s national standing was in tatters. It had no dominant spokesperson and no compelling narrative to explain how it would fix the country’s ills beyond simply rehashing liberal dogma. The question then confronting the Democrats, like the dilemma of the Republicans now, was what to do.
When the DLC was founded in 1985 the Democrats were perhaps at their lowest point nationally. In order to regain the party’s footing, the organization called for an end to the traditional “liberal” approach to policy. Rather, building on a cadre of centrist governors and members of Congress—Bill Clinton, Sam Nunn, Joe Lieberman, John Breaux, and Dave McCurdy among others—it proposed solutions that were more market based, pragmatic, and fiscally responsible. With Clinton’s election in 1992 the movement reached its ascendancy and policies such as NAFTA, welfare reform, a balanced budget, and the earned income tax credit helped reposition the Democrats as a party once again competent and identified with economic growth and prosperity.
While Bill Clinton brought the Democrats victories at the ballot box in 1992 and 1996, his centrism brought criticism from his left. Many members of Congress, still ensconced in the old liberalism (now rebranded “progressivism”) were critical of his stands on trade, welfare reform, and health care. While these intra-party squabbles were not totally responsible for the Republicans’ capture of Congress in 1994, one can argue that Clinton was more successful in dealing with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole than he was in corralling the Democratic base. Whichever side one took in this fight for the heart of the Democratic Party, one can’t deny the fact that the debate revitalized the party and made it think hard about policy. Despite George Bush’s capture of the White House, the elections of 2000 and 2004 were fought much more closely than those of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. The Republican’s Electoral Vote margin over those two contests was a mere 40 EVs and Bush never captured 51% of the popular vote. Democrats regained their congressional losses of the mid 90’s and laid the groundwork for what we saw transpire last year.
So what can the right learn from the Democrats’ period in the wilderness?? One lesson that can be drawn is that a party needs to grapple honestly with its past excesses. Those on the left who were being honest with themselves realized that there was a reason that voters moved so definitively to the right. While events such as last weekend’s CPAC gathering isn’t going to cater to this type of reflection among today’s conservatives, other more sober venues must. What makes this introspection complicated for many on the right, though, is that they are convinced that what was repudiated in 2006 and 2008 was not conservatism, but Bush-ism. For them, Bush failed not because he was too conservative (or because conservatism more broadly was being rejected) but rather because he was too liberal. With exploding deficits and long term expansions and commitments to Medicare and other programs, “compassionate conservatism” was simply liberalism by another name. Among many congressional Republicans, the decision to now vote against spending increases—despite consistently voting for them during Bush’s reign—signals an attempt to recapture the mantle of fiscal responsibility.

Another lesson for conservatives to ponder is the need for policy debate, intra-party discussion, and diverse solutions. While not everyone on the left shared the DLC’s approach to issues, it not only helped to stop the party’s decline (perhaps it couldn’t sink any lower) but allowed it to regain a foothold in certain parts of the country where the damage of the 1970’s and 80’s was most severe—i.e. the south. Not only was the DLC a centrist organization, it was also heavily southern flavored. Whereas New Deal liberalism was strongest in the urban north, southern Democrats have always been a different breed. By giving Democrats another model, and winning elections because of it, the DLC was able to help the party begin to grow again. One can’t help but look at today’s Blue Dogs and their contribution to the Democrats’ new and expanding majority in Congress as the progeny of what Clinton and others began. If the right wants to regain not only relevancy but power, it seems obvious that they must realize that parties—should they hope to be successful nationally and over the long term—are at root coalitions. The creation and maintenance of these coalitions requires a degree of pragmatism and leadership that seems lacking on the right. It also requires a belief that many of those not currently in the coalition should be allowed under the tent. This also seems to be a point of contention among many conservatives. If the right fails to come to these realizations, they may be closer to the beginning of their time in the wilderness than to the end.

Georgia Sen Runoff: Could it have been "Peach-ier" for Vernon Jones than Jim Martin?

Most press previews of today’s Georgia Senate runoff focus on how the result is expected to hinge on Afro-Am turnout.  Black voters were believed to have boosted overall turnout by over 600K this year and sliced McCain’s margin over Obama by ten points as compared to Bush’s 2004 margin over John Kerry.  And conservative white Democrats are believed to have returned to the fold down ballot after going for the McCain-Palin ticket for president.  (No wonder that the GOP has sent in Sarah Palin to rally the base in this expected low turnout runoff.) 

Performance doesn’t seem to be too far off, geographically-speaking.

Here’s the map of county returns for president:

 And here’s the Senate county map

Note Mitchell County’s tie!):

 

 Given this playing field, it’s difficult not to speculate how this race might be panning out if Dem nominee Jim Martin, a fmr. State rep. and failed Lt. Gov. nominee, had fallen to DeKalb Co. CEO Vernon Jones in the primary.  Jones’ bid might have been fatally wounded by ethics questions, but given his moderate – and even conservative – views on some issues and his geographic base, Jones might have been an ideal candidate.  In fact, Jones has flirted with Republicans: donating to the Georgia Republican Party and confessing to voting for George W. Bush, twice, all the while hectoring Martin for being insufficiently pro-Obama.   

Jones’ controversial temperament seems to have stunted his growth into a politician in the mold pioneered by Black Caucus Blue Dog Georgia House Democrats Sanford Bishop and David Scott, who have built up a support in white rural Georgia – the heart of Lester Maddox country! – by staking out conservative positions on issues such as gun control and positioning themselves as guardians of local and ag interests – particularly peanuts, in Bishop’s case.

Jones would differ significantly in that he would be the first politician to carve such a support base out of a booming New South county like DeKalb.  DeKalb is now majority Afro-Am, but continues to be fairly affluent even as its residents’ hues have changed.  Despite being home to the notorious giant bas-relief memorial to Confederate generals in Stone Mountain, DeKalb was a rare oasis of support for Richard Nixon, as George Wallace swept the Peach State in 1968.

While Bishop or Scott might be secretly harboring questions of how they might have been better positioned in this post-Obama runoff, Jones might be wondering - if he had crafted a more careful career – how he might have been able to cobble together an energized black Georgia electorate with just enough of a sliver of suburban Atlanta McCain voters still disaffected with the Bush Administration and Saxby Chambliss’ Congressional Republican cohorts to pull off a victory that might be just beyond the reach of the Democratic nominee, Jim Martin. 

ElectionDissection.com Book Review--Nixonland

Having finally finished “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein, I wanted to take some time to lay out my reaction to it. As I mentioned in my short blurb last week, “Nixonland” is the second part of a large project by Perlstein to describe the rise of modern conservatism. This project is extremely important, especially for those on the left, in that it presents a counter narrative to the accepted history of the era. For many liberals, the 1960’s were a time of ascendancy. The Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the rise of feminism, etc. have tended be portrayed in a triumphal light by many commentators. It was, for many, an era of progress. What Perlstein reminds us, however, is that this “progress” was not universally accepted or agreed upon. This was also an era of resentment and reaction. It is this backlash, and the politics it created, that is the focus of this work.

To get a sense of the political trajectory that is traveled, Perlstein bookends his study with two of the most lopsided elections in American history—1964 and 1972—and asks a simple question: How could a country that had first given Lyndon Johnson such a massive victory turn around and give Richard Nixon an even larger win eight years later? How could the country have swung so dramatically in such a short period of time?

The answer to this question, it seems, is that both of these victories were largely delivered by the same group of people. It is this group of people that are at the heart of Perlstein's work. In short, this turbulent period is defined not by who we would normally think of—the protesters, the rioters, the hippies, the baby boomer youth, the New Left—but rather by what Nixon identified as the “Silent Majority.” These were the millions of Americans who were, for the most part, most of the time, apolitical. They were working and middle class, and as such had an interest in stability, predictability, and order. They were the great center of the American electorate. As the 1960’s unfolds we see this group move perceptibly rightward in much of their voting.

For this to happen, however, something had to change in the American political system. While the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and other events certainly propelled this shift, I think that all of these were in many ways the product of a much larger systemic change beginning during this period. As I was finishing “Nixonland” and trying to put it into perspective, I came to conclude that the book is not just a story of the rise of conservatism, but perhaps more so it is the story of the collapse of New Deal Liberalism. One book that I came across several times in graduate school is Stephen Skowronek’s “The Politics Presidents Make.” In it, Skowronek argues that American history is characterized by periods of “political time.” By this, he means that politics at any given time is defined by a particular “regime”—namely a dominant coalition of interests, ideas, actors, and ideology. Over time, these regimes rise or decline in acceptance as they are more or less successful in solving problems and managing the emerging conflicts in society. Presidents are situated differently to these regimes and are sometimes, though rarely, able to replace one regime with another, or re-order the nature of politics. FDR is the classic example here. With the Depression, the old regime was in disarray and FDR was able to assume power and institute a new governing philosophy with the support of a newly organized coalition of supporters and ideas. It is this regime—New Deal Liberalism—that LBJ inherits some thirty years later. However, by the 1960’s, the ability of this Liberalism to manage the issues of the day is in doubt. As Skowronek explains, presidents like LBJ who seek to expand upon a regime and put their own stamp upon it are oftentimes unsuccessful. They try to do too much, they overreach, and the regime is subject to collapse. This is what we see in “Nixonland.” What the Great Society, the war in Vietnam, and the other policies pushed by Johnson do, in short, is create an unrealistic set of expectations among the public. When these expectations are inevitably not met, backlash is not far away. When this backlash is ripe, members of the dominant regime begin to turn on one another, setting the stage for the realignment of political and voting coalitions.

So, whereas the 1964 landslide is brought about through the votes of the older parts of the New Deal coalition (unions, farmers, urban whites) and newer groups (African Americans, the youth), by the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s these groups are splintering and turning on one another. While the newer members of the coalition are in the process of becoming more radicalized—the rise of Black Power, the balkanization of the anti-war movement, the emerging gay rights movement—those older members of the coalition feel abandoned and thus begin to gravitate rightward. This backlash is fueled by the inability of the old regime to solve the problems of the day. As crime and urban disorder become the top issue of concern to American voters, Liberalism provided no answer or solution. Another great discussion of this, parenthetically, focusing on New York, is provided by Vincent Cannato in “The Ungovernable City,” a biography of John Lindsay.

As this process unfolds, Richard Nixon rises to pick up the pieces. Throughout the book, Perlstein uses Nixon as a lens through which to view the period. Nixon, he argues, is just like those groups who feel abandoned or left behind. Throughout his life, he felt constantly slighted, underestimated, and condescended to. Thus, his political genius was his ability to read the mood of that great mass of Americans who simply wanted to return to a politics and a way of life they felt was under siege: “This was something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence—the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess” (p. 213). He uses the New Left as a foil, mocking their “pseudo-intellectualism” as opposed to his, and the Silent Majority’s solid values and patriotism.

While the story of “Nixonland,” as I argued above, seems to be more about the collapse of Liberalism, it is not necessarily the story of the final triumph of Conservatism. Rather, this is a period where things fall apart without necessarily being rebuilt. It would take Reagan (and this would seem to be where Perlstein will go next) to accomplish this. The Nixon we get in this history is one that is not terribly ideological and without a fixed governing philosophy. In fact, in domestic affairs he accepts many of the liberal assumptions and policies. Furthermore, if we look at other elections during the period, we see a Liberalism that still has some life in it. While Nixon is elected in 1968 and re-elected in 1972, he has no noticeable coattails in congressional elections. The Democrats maintain large majorities in both chambers of Congress and gain seats in the 1970 midterm. So while the Silent Majority was beginning a process of moving rightward, they hadn’t moved wholesale yet. What John and I have spent a lot of time looking at on this site is where these voters ended up.

There seem to be several lessons that can be drawn from Perlstein’s work, especially for those on the left. The first of these is the danger of overreach. What we saw under Johnson, it seems, was an overestimation of the country’s appetite for massive change. Here, I’m reminded of my great professor at UW-Madison, Charles O. Jones. In his writings on policy making and the presidency, he always warned against what many call “the myth of the mandate.” Essentially, big electoral victories tend to be interpreted as a sign that voters are in agreement upon a wholesale policy agenda. The reality, Jones always taught, was that voters vote for candidates for a variety of reasons, many not connected to policy at all. When presidents act as if they have a clear mandate, they set themselves up for failure. Thus, we might look at this turbulent period and ask whether, in the future, a more “humble” or “incremental” approach to governing is warranted, lest we risk the fracturing and backlash that Perlstein describes.

A second lesson I would draw from this story is the need to avoid the temptation of ideological self-righteousness and self-absorption. The great value of Perlstein’s project is that he, as a progressive, is willing to look critically at the left. This period gives him plenty of fertile ground to explore. The fact of the matter is that many of the people he describes (and who have been lionized in many histories of the 60’s) would seem to have been pretty insufferable to deal with. The ultimate failure of people like Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Bobby Seale, and others was not so much that their positions were wrong, but that their tactics made them easy targets for the forces mobilizing on the right. What was lacking among those on the left—and this may have been a function of a Liberalism in decline—was anyone of stature who could put the brakes on the process that was unfolding. The irony of this is that as the war dragged on, and as Perlstein describes, more and more members of the “Silent Majority” were being drawn to the anti-war movement. Had the leadership of this movement been less dogmatic and less confrontational early on, they perhaps might have had more success.

Aside from the main themes just described, there were some sections and topics that I found particularly interesting. First was his discussion of how Nixon was able to implement the “southern strategy.” Here, the role of Strom Thurmond was instrumental. While I had originally read about this before, I think in “The Making of the President 1968,” Perlstein describes the relationship between Thurmond and Nixon in much greater detail. We see how these two were able to court each other and ensure that each's interests were being served. With the Wallace vote threatening to keep the White House in the Democrats’ hands, Nixon was able to convince Thurmond (on issues like busing, school desegregation, etc.) that he would embrace state’s rights and strict constructionism. With Thurmond’s blessing (and signals to other southern leaders and voters), Nixon was able to win enough of the south, including Thurmond’s South Carolina, to capture the presidency.

A second section I particularly enjoyed was his narrative on how Watergate came about. When thinking about this scandal, the conclusion that many draw is that Nixon’s dirty tricks campaign was unnecessary. The fault of this analysis, it seems, is that we tend to view Watergate with the hindsight of knowing how the 1972 election turned out. In other words, why would a president who won 49 states need to break into the Democratic headquarters as part of a systematic process of infiltrating his opposition? What Perlstein gives us is, I think, is more of the answer than we've gotten before. What we see is that going into the 1972 election, Nixon’s victory was anything but assured. His level of popularity fluctuated. Opposition to the war was growing. So after the 1970 midterms, Nixon’s fear of holding the White House intensified and reached a level of paranoia. It was out of this context that Watergate was spawned.

Finally, as should be no surprise to anyone who has read my postings, I was interested in Perlstein’s discussion of race. I’ve long felt that the period of the civil rights movement that has been understudied is the time when the movement came north. As Martin Luther King concluded that issues of race and poverty couldn’t be disentangled, not only did answers and solutions become much more elusive, but the collision of the movement with the entrenched segregation of blacks in northern cities became inevitable and tragic. Thus, we have large scale riots in dozens of northern cities (Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland) and we are able to see how the reaction and backlash among many whites played out. So, in places like Cicero, Illinois, we see the large story that runs throughout “Nixonland” played out on a small scale. It was here that I found myself less certain about the culpability of those on the left for the backlash that emerged on the right. While its easier to question the tactics of those opposing the war, I find myself unable to say that confronting the poverty, segregation, and discrimination that existed in these cities head on was ill adivsed. It is perhaps because of the intractability of these issues that race continues to be the one cleavage described in "Nixonland" that endures stronger than the others to this day.

Updates to follow…

ElectionDissection.com Book Club

I'm going to be doing a series of posts over the next little while, now that the primaries are winding down, on the fantastic new book by Rick Perlstein, "Nixonland." The second in his series on the rise of conservatism in America (following up on "Before the Storm"), the book is essentially a portrait of the period from 1964-1972. What makes his work so interesting is that it challenges, and presents a counter to, the traditional narrative of the 1960's that many have given us. While he discusses at length the anti-war movement, the rise of black power, and other developments on the left, what Perlstein is more interested in explaining is what was going on in reaction to these movements. Using Nixon as the central actor, "Nixonland" is, in short, the history of the Silent Majority.

If you've read this blog, especially many of my earlier posts, you know that this is an era and a movement that I'm fascinated in, and one which I believe can still be felt today. Because I'm not quite finished with the book yet, I'm going to hold off on a long analysis. Also, I'm going to an event at the National Press Club tomorrow at which Perlstein will be discussing his work so I want to hear what he has to say. Nonetheless, pick "Nixonland" up and dive in.