Transient color.

I have been reading historian William Leuchtenburg’s excellent The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.  It’s a hefty meaty book and a good read.  I’m purposely taking one president at a time, pausing between them to read something else while considering their individual legacy.  Being born into and raised in the twentieth century, the book covers a good chuck of my lifetime.  So it’s familiar territory put in perspective by an astute observer.  Professor Leuchtenburg, in his vigorous 90s, is hard at work (mostly here in Chapel Hill) on a Washington to McKinley volume.  I look forward to it.

Assessing presidencies is tricky business.  Who were truly the best, who the worst, requires some time and distance. It also involves, even for the historian, a dose of subjectivity.  What strikes me in reading of their collective tenures is how imperfect, even flawed, each of them were.  Faced with momentous decisions, they often made significant steps forward, but at times each also made disastrous mistakes that took decades, if ever, to set right.  We like to think of our leaders, particularly the ones for whom we have voted and supported, as something special.  Some of them are, of course, but always in the context of being human.  They may play on history’s stage with breathtaking brilliance but at times with dazzling ineptness.  Of course, while in hindsight we may see their missteps clearly, they were often far from self-evident at the time.  They could lead us to victory but could also snatch defeat out of a victory that had been it hand.   One prime example was when Harry Truman, after successfully achieving his stated goals in Korea, disastrously extended the war into what remains an unresolved stalemate.  We still suffer the consequences.

To be sure times change and with them our view of things, sometimes leading to some ironic twists even in how we add color to the scene.  Reading about the 1950s under Truman and then Eisenhower brought back especially vivid memories.  They were my formative school years.  For today’s nostalgia buffs, let me tell you that the 50s were not a great time in American.  They were dominated in large measure by an obsessive fear of communism.  That obsession impacted both our foreign and domestic policy for decades to come.  Communism had a color: red. 

Our ears and eyes were exposed to scarlet words, attributes and slogans.  There was red by itself, “the Reds”, “red states” (especially Red China), “red bating”, the “red scare” and, of course, the “red menace”.  The Cold War was in its infancy in 1950 and Truman himself submitted to the hysteria.  The House Committee on Un-American Activities (first established in the 1930s) infamously grew in reckless power running roughshod over individual rights.  Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin became a national largely unchallenged finger-pointing figure.  The lion’s share of this terrible decade was presided over by war hero Dwight Eisenhower supported by fellow Republicans an right wing Southern Democrats (who would switch over to the GOP a decade later).  

That history brings me back to the color red.  It’s no wonder that in reading about those years in a current context I couldn’t help but think of a supreme irony.  While the GOP in the 1950s derisively referred not only to communists as red and liberals as at least “pink”, today’s Republican dominated states are, of all things, labeled red.  They wear the red designation with pride hoping to spread it across the land.  How times change us and how we talk.

I am not of the “history repeats itself” school.  That said, it’s not surprising that echoes of other ages — of human behavior — find their way into the present.   The Soviet Union is no more and the meaning of “red” has clearly taken a sharp attribution turn, but there is something of the 1950s in our present discourse.  And it’s something no less disturbing or, if it gets out of hand, threatening to our democracy.  Today Islamophobia has replaced our 1950s irrational fear of Communism and people who sound increasingly like the purveyors of a “red scare” are seeking to fill us with twenty-first century terror.  The idea of barring Muslims from entering our borders or seeking that citizens who happen to follow Islam should take some kind of loyalty oath or disavow tenants of their faith and practice are chilling reminders of past trumped-up bad times.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking but “trumped-up” is the good English language term to describe what happened during the late Truman and Eisenhower years.  It fits again.

This is the year of an appeal to fear.  It’s what we heard or read about all last week.  And it’s not over.  Just as Trump and the Republicans stoked up fear of the Other whether an implied Islamic “third column” or its equally dangerous Mexican criminal immigrant counterpart, Clinton and the Democrats are sure to invoke the fear of what his presidency would bring.  Now don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t a matter of being even handed — there is no moral equivalency in these two candidates or their present party configurations — but to state how things are likely to go down between now and November.   Objective reasoning will probably go out the window because it simply won’t work in the present national mood.   Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 “Daisy Commercial” was the ultimate presidential election appeal to fear.  It helped bring down Barry Goldwater.  And by the way, don’t let anyone tell you that going viral is something new, the exclusive domain of our digital age.  Daisy aired only once, but its power reverberated to such a degree that it remains controversial more than fifty years on.  Despite a lack of social media and instant communications everyone knew of it and even those who didn’t see it aired in real time can still picture that little girl picking daisy pedals in a countdown that ends in a mushroom cloud.  Some version of Daisy is likely to raise its ugly head during the current campaign.

I know what I’d like some future historian to be writing as the 2016 election.   My only hope is that a majority of Americans feel the same.  I think my hope will be fulfilled, but there is no guarantee.  Absolutely none.  We have had demagogues on the scene throughout our history and some, like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy, were elected to statewide public office.  We’ve had bitter campaigns with poisonous rhetoric since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson contended in the early days.  But we’ve never had the likes of Donald Trump nominated for the presidency by one of our two major parties.  Nothing is sure in elections and his being on the ballot represents a real and meaningful risk.  He appeals to those who want a return to an America that once was.  That’s impossible.  So his big lie is that his victory will almost certainly insure an America that neither they nor we have ever seen before.  And looking at what happened in Cleveland last week, it will be a very dark America.

The color red was considered dangerous to America in the 1950s.  As things have evolved since the 1980s its morphed redness, most especially since John McCain brought the person and ilk of Sarah Palin to the national ticket, seems no less so.  At least that’s how I see it and hope a majority of my fellow citizens will as well.  We’ve taken down the demagogues and fringe politicians in the past.  Hopefully, we will have the will, the courage and most importantly that we will make the required effort, to do so again.

Endless campaign's unspoken damage.

Admission 1: I’m a long-term political junkie, have been since elementary school.  Regardless of who is in office, I never miss a State-of-the-Union.  I’ve watched political conventions since they’ve been broadcast on TV, some years nearly gavel to gavel.  I watch presidential press conferences, major speeches/events on C-Span or YouTube including the funerals of, among others, Mario Cuomo and Antonin Scalia.  Needless to say, passing up a vote is never an option.

Admission 2: I haven’t seen a single presidential debate — Democratic or Republican — in this primary election cycle.  Why?  I could say watching them in this bizarre year is just too painful, and that would be true.  A lot of “ink” has been devoted to the vitriol in both the campaign and our current politics.  Some suggest how unprecedented the tone and outlandishness.  Perhaps we haven’t recently witnessed its like, but it has all happened before.  I’m reading historian William Leuchtenburg’s new book, The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.  At 93 he’s hard at work on the companion Washington to McKinley volume.  What strikes me in the reading is how rough and messy our politics has been throughout.  That impression was reinforced by a Charlie Rose interview with Ron Chernow, whose biography of our first Treasury Secretary inspired the hit show Hamilton.  The competitive mean-spiritedness of our idealized Founders would have made perfect fodder for today’s cable and Twitter. That doesn’t make what’s afoot today less disconcerting, less off putting.  But what’s keeping me less engaged isn’t nasty discourse, it's fatigue.

Back in April 2014 I posted a blog that began with these words, “The envelope was in my mailbox, the return address: “Ready for Hillary 2016”.  My immediate response: not so much — certainly not yet.  Beyond all else,” the post continued, “I am so not ready for two and a half protracted years of presidential politics.”  Indeed, the 2014 Congressional elections were still months away, ones that seemed of more immediate importance.  I saw the solicitation “as a distraction at the very moment when we can ill afford to avert our attention from the immediate task at hand.  Do her supporters", I asked, "not realize how important it is to hold the Senate; are they intentionally trying to undermine our sitting Democratic president?”  For Clinton, the campaign, albeit unannounced, was underway despite President Obama’s being barely in year two of his second term.  I’ll get back to that.   We all know the result of that lack of attention — that implied dismissal of a sitting majority elected president.

Help me here — two and a half years?  No other democracy in the world spends even a fraction of that time in campaign mode.  Indeed, some restrict national elections to a matter of weeks.   Campaigns are shorter and, yes, more citizens vote.  In an all time record year like 2008 only 57% of eligible voters cast ballots for president and that number declined to 54% in 2012; less than half of them vote in primaries.  For sure, money is a huge problem in our politics.  We spend far more on elections than anyone else on the globe.  Citizens United was a horrible decision, but I don’t think campaign spending is the primary problem.   The real killer is time; endless distracting and numbing months of speeches evoking largely manufactured “news”.  To be sure, time and money are related  — it takes bundles to sustain extended campaigning, but solve the time problem and fixing the money problem will follow.  The same is true, though clearly on a smaller scale, for congressional elections.  It’s no wonder that so little gets done in Washington when many Senators and Congresspersons are on the road not in their seats on the floor.  It’s sometimes hard to tell which is their primary job, carrying out legislative duties or campaigning.  All too often the two are indistinguishable.

It’s claimed that the current presidential campaign is evoking considerable interest.  Perhaps that’s the case, but I wonder how many Americans really know much about where candidates stand on substantive issues, or even if they have any coherent policy positions.  It should be instructive that Donald Trump with the fewest, a person given to what I’d call hour-long “tweet speeches” gets the most press.  Even if Americans had more than an infant’s attention span, and we don’t, there is just so long that anyone can honestly spend following these endless campaigns.  In fact, rather than enhancing they compromise democracy, which alone argues for a more humanly reasonable campaign season.

But what is the real and immediate damage of endless campaigning?  It undermines orderly governance and by extension all our interests.  A prime example can be found in the political charade surrounding the filling of a vital Supreme Court seat.  Returning to my April ’14 post and that independent (if you can believe that) solicitation by Hillary supporters.  I posed the question then about the appropriateness of the timing, only a year and a half into Obama’s four-year term.  In that context, isn’t it hard to question the Republican’s current position that effectively his presidency is over with less than a year to go?  I’m by no means suggesting that Hillary is to blame for the current situation, certainly not purposefully so.  But drawing the connection, inadvertent as it might be, is not too much of a stretch.  It is certainly a question that I would hope she and those who put that letter in my mailbox are asking of themselves.

Of course, what Clinton and others in both parties before her (including Obama) have done in reflects a systematic problem.  If they are guilty of anything it is following the “regular order of business” or of submitting to an unending campaign habit that has measurable and predictable consequences.   The nomination of Judge Merrick Garland is clearly falling victim to that order.  In most places — United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel and Canada, for example — campaigning would still be months away.  Contending that a president or prime minister who had been elected for, in our case, four years was no longer accorded his Constitutional power nine months early would be both untenable, even laughable.  It is also totally inconsistent.   Barack Obama can send American troops across the globe, he can fire (one of Trumps favorite prerogatives of office) cabinet and many other government employees, and he can hire without consent anyone who doesn’t require congressional approval.  He can declare emergencies and send aid to victims of all manor of disaster.  Of course he can order up and fly Air Force One to Cuba and beyond.  I could go on, but you get the point.  Rest assured, if the Kentucky River overflows its banks or some coalmine disaster occurs in the state, Senator McConnell will want, indeed demand, the sitting president to exercise those powers.

Endless presidential campaigns don’t only induce my and your fatigue, they work against exercising our civic responsibilities; they endanger a full functioning government.  While on the campaign trial, senators absent themselves from their sworn duties and governors from theirs for months on end.  They don’t do so without often high cost.  Once in campaign mode, which sadly these days means most of the time, every discussion and every decision is undertaken in a political context.  Will this advance my personal or my party’s interests?  Will it lead me/us to, or keep me/us in, power?  Will it damage the “other side”?  Lot’s of questions.  Note that “will it advance the public good” is not among them.

We’re going to slug through this endless election cycle and most probably others to follow.  What I wonder is when will we admit that it’s all too much, that the cost, not only financial, is far too high, the risk far too great.  My fatigue this year — and surely I’m not alone — should be a wake up call.  The endless campaign's impact on filling Scalia's seat should make us all awake in a cold sweat.  Time we start thinking about breaking this most stupid “norm”.  And please don’t tell be it’s the “new normal”, the ultimate copout cliché of our time.