How clean was Gene?
Two critical takes on Eugene McCarthy's legacy, both commenting on his stupendous ortatorical skills, then criticizing his quixotic politics.
First, Mark Kleiman writes:
McCarthy's major political accomplishment was the election of Richard M. Nixon to the Presidency, and thus, among other disasters, the prolongation of the War in Vietnam and its expansion into Cambodia, along with the ascendancy of the Strom Thurmond wing of the Republican Party and the eventual replacement of Earl Warren by William Rehnquist. For a man whose two primary political commitments were advocacy of civil rights and opposition to the war, that's a sad epitaph, but it's the truth.
And McCarthy was much too smart not to have known precisely what he was doing. Hubris is a terrible affliction.
Then, David Kusnet writes about McCarthy's gripping exhortation to delegates at the 1960 Convention to abandon their pledges to Kennedy and renominate Adlai Stevenson for a third time (something, Charles Peters argues in his autobiography that didn't happen only because Stevenson himself proceded to give a lackluster speech):
Brilliant as it was, McCarthy's speech made a virtue of Stevenson's reluctance in 1960 and his diffident campaign style in 1952 and 1956. "[P]ower often comes to those who seek it," McCarthy intoned. "But history does not prove that power is always well used by those who seek it." Stevenson, he continued, was not seeking power in 1960 and "did not seek power for himself in 1952 ... [or] in 1956"--a remarkable statement about a presidential nominee.
With these words, McCarthy set the stage for a series of liberal presidential candidacies, including his own in 1968, Morris Udall's in 1976, John Anderson's in 1980, Bruce Babbitt's in 1988, and Bill Bradley's in 2000, that were lionized by affluent liberals but failed to appeal to working class voters who wanted a president who would wield power on their behalf. Power, after all, may not be best used by those who seek it; but it rarely ends up in the hands of those who do not seek it, actively and effectively.
With the caveat that all this was way, waaayyyy before my time, my impression of Stevenson has always been fairly negative: of a not-too-liberal statesman who should have followed his instincts and stayed out of electoral politics, where his intellectualism hurt him and where he relied too much on the affection and accolades of "thinking men" rather than the "majority" -- the people who needed him and who he needed to win. Humphrey, though hardly more electable than Stevenson, strikes me as one of American liberalism's more tragic figures: a pragmatist, ferociously loyal and certainly one of the more genuine, less hedging political heros of the civil rights movement. (This wiki account of his meeting with Fannie Lou Hamer, in which she chides him for the ambition he was too frank to hide from her, strikes me as one of the more poignant moments in the history of American politics. She was, of course, right that the Freedom Democrats' cause was bigger than his distress. And yet his own concerns, his pleading, is so totally understandable, and the whole encounter such a sad example of people with similar, laudable goals at cross purposes.)
Of course, one result of Humphrey's loss was to make American politics in general and Democratic Party politics in particular more democratic, with the McGovern-Fraser reforms to the primary and delegate selection process leading to a much more democratic -- in the sense of voter-controlled -- nominating process. Party bosses and powerful politicians lost much of their power -- something that McCarthy, who later came to hate and agitate against the fixity of the two-party system, must have appreciated. Today we might see Al Sharpton going overtime on his speech at the DNC but we won't see a McCarthy urging us to reject the nominee chosen by voters in favour of an insider favourite, or of a candidate like Humphrey winning the nomination without winning any voter primaries.
Yet even with more binding, representative (though I'd say still not representative enough, at least geographically) primary elections, we most certainly retain an often unrealistic loathing for the ambition, deal-making, pandering, calculation and the rest of it that successful politicians invariably embody. You can argue that the last three conservative presidents, each worse than the last, were brought to us in part by that quixotic reaction among liberals, coupled with the appeal of a McCarthy-type candidate (though, as Kleiman points out, in McCarthy's case it was his refusal to help out the "lesser of two evils" once he'd been defeated that was objectionable, not his actual primary candidacy) -- against the perception of ambition, deal-making, and the trackmarks of complacent incumbancy on the left. It's a lot more complicated than that of course, and if anything was ever worth shaking up politics over, the Vietnam War, and the way American politicians on both right and left handled it -- up to and including the Humphrey nomination and Daley's crackdown on the protesters -- was it. But if the major part of McCarthy's legacy is a snotty, reflexive aversion to the realities of liberals who seek and hold power, it's certainly not something to cheer.
Update: The Martini Republic has a more eloquent riff on this theme.
First, Mark Kleiman writes:
McCarthy's major political accomplishment was the election of Richard M. Nixon to the Presidency, and thus, among other disasters, the prolongation of the War in Vietnam and its expansion into Cambodia, along with the ascendancy of the Strom Thurmond wing of the Republican Party and the eventual replacement of Earl Warren by William Rehnquist. For a man whose two primary political commitments were advocacy of civil rights and opposition to the war, that's a sad epitaph, but it's the truth.
And McCarthy was much too smart not to have known precisely what he was doing. Hubris is a terrible affliction.
Then, David Kusnet writes about McCarthy's gripping exhortation to delegates at the 1960 Convention to abandon their pledges to Kennedy and renominate Adlai Stevenson for a third time (something, Charles Peters argues in his autobiography that didn't happen only because Stevenson himself proceded to give a lackluster speech):
Brilliant as it was, McCarthy's speech made a virtue of Stevenson's reluctance in 1960 and his diffident campaign style in 1952 and 1956. "[P]ower often comes to those who seek it," McCarthy intoned. "But history does not prove that power is always well used by those who seek it." Stevenson, he continued, was not seeking power in 1960 and "did not seek power for himself in 1952 ... [or] in 1956"--a remarkable statement about a presidential nominee.
With these words, McCarthy set the stage for a series of liberal presidential candidacies, including his own in 1968, Morris Udall's in 1976, John Anderson's in 1980, Bruce Babbitt's in 1988, and Bill Bradley's in 2000, that were lionized by affluent liberals but failed to appeal to working class voters who wanted a president who would wield power on their behalf. Power, after all, may not be best used by those who seek it; but it rarely ends up in the hands of those who do not seek it, actively and effectively.
With the caveat that all this was way, waaayyyy before my time, my impression of Stevenson has always been fairly negative: of a not-too-liberal statesman who should have followed his instincts and stayed out of electoral politics, where his intellectualism hurt him and where he relied too much on the affection and accolades of "thinking men" rather than the "majority" -- the people who needed him and who he needed to win. Humphrey, though hardly more electable than Stevenson, strikes me as one of American liberalism's more tragic figures: a pragmatist, ferociously loyal and certainly one of the more genuine, less hedging political heros of the civil rights movement. (This wiki account of his meeting with Fannie Lou Hamer, in which she chides him for the ambition he was too frank to hide from her, strikes me as one of the more poignant moments in the history of American politics. She was, of course, right that the Freedom Democrats' cause was bigger than his distress. And yet his own concerns, his pleading, is so totally understandable, and the whole encounter such a sad example of people with similar, laudable goals at cross purposes.)
Of course, one result of Humphrey's loss was to make American politics in general and Democratic Party politics in particular more democratic, with the McGovern-Fraser reforms to the primary and delegate selection process leading to a much more democratic -- in the sense of voter-controlled -- nominating process. Party bosses and powerful politicians lost much of their power -- something that McCarthy, who later came to hate and agitate against the fixity of the two-party system, must have appreciated. Today we might see Al Sharpton going overtime on his speech at the DNC but we won't see a McCarthy urging us to reject the nominee chosen by voters in favour of an insider favourite, or of a candidate like Humphrey winning the nomination without winning any voter primaries.
Yet even with more binding, representative (though I'd say still not representative enough, at least geographically) primary elections, we most certainly retain an often unrealistic loathing for the ambition, deal-making, pandering, calculation and the rest of it that successful politicians invariably embody. You can argue that the last three conservative presidents, each worse than the last, were brought to us in part by that quixotic reaction among liberals, coupled with the appeal of a McCarthy-type candidate (though, as Kleiman points out, in McCarthy's case it was his refusal to help out the "lesser of two evils" once he'd been defeated that was objectionable, not his actual primary candidacy) -- against the perception of ambition, deal-making, and the trackmarks of complacent incumbancy on the left. It's a lot more complicated than that of course, and if anything was ever worth shaking up politics over, the Vietnam War, and the way American politicians on both right and left handled it -- up to and including the Humphrey nomination and Daley's crackdown on the protesters -- was it. But if the major part of McCarthy's legacy is a snotty, reflexive aversion to the realities of liberals who seek and hold power, it's certainly not something to cheer.
Update: The Martini Republic has a more eloquent riff on this theme.
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