Gentle readers are no doubt familiar with the outlines of the 1948 presidential election. Harry Truman was the Democrat incumbent, but the immortal Missourian had managed to alienate two crucial constituencies, both of which broke from the party to run independent campaigns.
On the left, Truman had alienated the pinkish, socialist Ds with his confrontation of the Soviets after the close of WWII. Those folks ran Henry Wallace, FDR's VP in his third term, finding Truman's anticommunism repugnant.*
Elsewhere (but it's not the right, as racism is in fact alien to conservatism), the segregationists of the solidly Democratic South were incensed by Truman's integration of the armed forces.** They ran South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (who later switched to the Republican Party that embraced a mild form of segregationist rhetoric in 1968) to punish Truman for stepping away from segregationist orthodoxy.
Truman, of course, managed somehow to win, having been expected to lose to Republican nominee Thomas Dewey, a popular governor of New York who had given FDR a decent challenge in 1944. His blend of populist rhetoric, anticommunism, folksy charm, unimpeachable integrity and political energy proved irresistible to the mainstream of American voters.
On Wednesday, remarking that hard-working folk and white folk would prefer to vote for her than Obama, Hillary Clinton evoked memories of Strom Thurmond. It remains to be seen whether she or her party will ever pay for this awful revival of everything that is worst about the political party that Lincoln didn't belong to. If recent history is any predictor of the near future, the answer is no. Latent racism in the Democratic Party is still largely eclipsed by the Republicans' adoption of the so-called "southern strategy" in 1968, a legacy that continues to hinder their wider demographic appeal.
In this comparison between 2008 and 1948, what strikes us is the absence of a figure like Truman among the Democrats. There has been no vigorous internationalist and economic moderate among the Ds. Indeed, there hasn't been one on the national scene (though locally they do seem to survive) in decades.
While it would be unfair to say that Obama, or virtually any recent Democrat, is as hospitable to socialism as Henry Wallace and his menagerie of Trotskyites, Obama is certainly more a man of the conventional left than the mainstream middle. What record of legislation Obama has and what specifics of policy proposals he lays forth are all the predictable, dreary, oft-proved-to-be-self-defeating positions in the heritage of Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern (now an Obama supporter, as if anyone wanted his support), Walter Mondale, Tom Daschele, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman.
To put it differently, Obama is clearly to the left of where Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton governed. The blood runs cold at the thought.
As to Obama's being the post-racial candidate, Hillary has now spoiled that celebration, with unfortunate help from Jeremiah Wright.
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*Democratic party leaders, the guys now derided as inhabiting the "smoke-filled room," forced FDR to accept Truman as running mate because they expected FDR to die in office and believed that Wallace would be awful for the country as President. Those were the days!
**Truman in his personal life expressed the conventional racism of his time, using racial and ethnic slurs and stereotypes and enjoying racist jokes. Yet he had the courage, principle and vision to integrate the armed forces. That impresses us all the more.
3 comments:
Well, I think what Hillary is being accused of here is perhaps worse than racism: that is, employing racist sentimentality for political gain. But then again, name-calling is always fun.
vbbgety
We've removed "Brad's" comment because of it violates our explicit and implicit rules for comments. It (a) depended on strictly personal invective; (b) used a vulgar participle to modify the noun that carried the invective. And all that to say that people are wrong to call Hillary a racist. Fair enough, but we didn't do that, and neither are any others whom we hear on this subject.
We note for the future that we do not regard vulgarities or profanities to be less vulgar or profane if one substitutes an asterisk for a vowel. We challenge those who find it impossible to express strong feelings without Angolo-Saxon words for personal matters to expand their verbal palettes in other directions.
We also thank Bryan D for his incisive response in advance of our deletion of the comment. He is entirely correct: Hillary is no racist, but she is vainly playing to the latent racist sensibilities of a segment of the American electorate. More specifically, she is playing to what she hopes is the belief of Democratic super-delegates that working-class white Americans are racists.
Truman, by contrast, could more fairly be labeled a racist, yet he acted politically on anti-racist principle. The contrast is instructive and disturbing.
We note further that if Hillary supporters are desperate enough to use offensive language in comments on this blog, her political doom is all the more clear.
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