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Not the Party of Lincoln

130205_abraham_lincoln_ap_605_605Abraham Lincoln is the one American president everyone claims, well almost everyone. Lincoln is the model of principled leader, the shrewd strategist navigating through the most severe crisis the nation has ever faced. His writing skills astound. His humor, much of it self deprecating, was a marvel. I can make the case that Lincoln invented the role of commander-in-chief and despite his lack of education in military matters he became a better strategist than any of his generals, including Grant.

Lincoln’s Social and Economic Policy

In one year of his presidency, 1862, Lincoln signed four nation changing acts. One was the Homestead Act, a massive transfer of wealth to thousands of Americans who, without the chance to own and live off the their own land, had little hope of improving their economic status. One of the beneficiaries of was my grandfather, a poor Missouri boy who staked out his homestead in the sand hill country of western Nebraska just after the turn of the 20th Century. He proved up his place and got married to a woman whose husband had abandoned her leaving my grandmother with two young sons to raise on her own. Their marriage produced my dad who would admire to the end of his days the grit and determination of his own father in carving a life out of the land. My grandfather later owned a successful business, became the mayor of his adopted home town and gave his own sons, including my dad, a big leg up on life. It all started with Mr. Lincoln signing that Homestead Act in 1862.

That same year, 1862, the president also put his A. Lincoln on the Morrill Act creating the great system of public higher education – Land_grant_college_stampthe land grant colleges – that helped further transform the country and cemented the idea that everyone had a chance to attain an education and acquire a profession. I graduated from a land grant college, so too members of my family.

In 1862 Lincoln also authorized the transcontinental railroad, a massive windfall for a handful of already very wealthy railroad barons, but also a massive public works project that created wealth from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Many of those who benefited from the homesteads and the education and the railroads were immigrants, Irish and German, Swede and Finn. All came to America looking for opportunity and many finding it thanks to enlightened Republican-inspired public policy created, hard to believe, in the middle of a great civil war. All told the social and economic policy made during that one year of Lincoln’s presidency transformed America.

The fourth great accomplishment of 1862 was, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, an audacious expansion of presidential power that Lincoln’s many critics condemned as executive overreach. One wonders if that executive order will stand the test of time?

In an engaging and provocative new book – To Make Men Free – Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson tells the story of the creation of the Republican Party – Lincoln’s party – as an activist, results oriented movement that was determined to support “a la-la-ca-0919-heather-cox-richardson-087-jpg-20140924strong and growing middle class, whose members had fought to defend the government during the war and now used government money and owned government bonds, paid government taxes and attended government-funded colleges, and gave their wholehearted allegiance to the nation.” Oh, yes, Lincoln’s Republican Party also championed immigration.

It is a curious twist of history that the Republican Party of Lincoln, a party that began as a champion of the middle class and freed the slaves, now so closely identifies with the most privileged among us, while catering to older, white voters, many in the south. Democrats have undergone their own evolution, as well, transforming a white, southern-dominated party that once stood mostly for state’s rights and private privilege into a party that embraced civil rights and now commands the allegiance of America’s growing minority population.

As the Los Angeles Times noted in it’s review of To Make Men Free, “Richardson traces the [Republican] transformation from an egalitarian and broad-minded coalition into a narrow and disappearing one, increasingly trapped in a demographic isolation booth of its own making.” Richardson argues the Republican transformation from Lincoln’s party to the Tea Party has hardly been a straight line progression. Theodore Roosevelt with his efforts to cut monopoly down to size and Dwight Eisenhower with tax policy and the interstate highway system were other Republican presidents who tried to return the party to its founding principles. Those efforts did not last and now the GOP has fully embraced a philosophy that is almost entirely based on opposition to the current man in the White House and tax cuts mostly designed to benefit the Koch Brothers class. One doubts whether Republican icons like T.R. and Ike could get out of an Iowa caucus these days. They simply stood for too much that is foreign to today’s Republican Party.

And…Then There Was Immigration

Now that Barack Obama has finally pulled the pin on the immigration grenade and rolled it across the table to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the country’s poisonous partisanship instantly became even more toxic. As is usually the case with this president he did a masterfully inept job of setting up the showdown.

Six months ago Obama might have given his GOP adversaries a public deadline for legislative action and framed the debate in simple, stark terms. Congressional Republicans have a chance to prove, Obama might have said, that they are not completely captured by the xenophobia of their most radical elements. He could have added the hope that Republicans would chose carefully their approach and then stumped the country for a specific proposal. Of course I know the Senate long ago passed a bipartisan immigration bill, but that recent history is lost on all but the most inside players. Obama’s approach to both teeing up and framing the issue and the predictable Republican reaction just doubles down on do nothing. The political environment grows more heavily seasoned with rancor that breeds hatred.

While Obama remains a maddeningly aloof personality who displays a persistent unwillingness to engage in the grubby details of politics, it is also true that the modern Republican Party has been captured, as Heather Cox Richardson says, by its no-to-everything base and can “no longer engage with the reality of actual governance.”

Obama, one suspects, will ultimately win the immigration fight. Facts, logic and demographics are on his side, not to mention an American tradition of fairness and justice. But in the meantime the senseless and petty partisanship rolls on. Congressman Raul Labrador suggests a government shutdown “lite” that would stop confirmation of any Obama appointees and slash some budgets. Others whisper impeachment and House Republicans have sued the president.

The incoming Senate Majority Leader says the new Republican Congress will consider a range of alternatives to deal with the president’s unprecedented power grab, which is not, of course, unprecedented at all. Here’s an idea for Senator McConnell who promises “forceful action” – how about you all pass a bill to fix the immigration mess. What a novel idea. Lawmakers legislating. Almost Lincolnesque.

2014 Election, Campaign Finance, Poetry, Tamarack

The Winner Is…

How far we have come, or perhaps fallen.

The Republican romp across the electoral map yesterday may or may not prove to be a defining moment in the “re-branding” of the national GOP in advance of the 2016 presidential election to which all eyes now turn, but it most assuredly marks the first national election where the candidates – Republican and Democratic – lost control of their campaigns to the growing forces of dark money, secretly spent.

Barack ObamaThe 2014 mid-terms will be dissected by pundits to assess the real message of the dispiriting campaigns. Surely the president’s vast unpopularity is a big part of the story, so too the fact that Republican Senate candidates generally won in states where Mitt Romney ran well two years ago. Barack Obama long ago lost control of his presidency thanks to inattention, missteps, lack of political skill, or just a remarkable inability to turn clumsy GOP roadblocks into hurdles that he could clear. It’s also obvious that America was not quite ready yet for “post-racial” politics after Obama’s stunning election in 2008. In fact, part of Obama’s legacy may turn out to be that he finally helped complete Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” of making all the states of the old Confederacy the most dependable part of the Republican base.

Still the real and lasting import of 2014 is hidden right in plan sight on our televisions – the attack ads, the depressing repetition of half-truth and distortion that is the uncontested central feature of our politics. Of course, all the distressing multi-billion dollar sleaze is financed by more money than ever before from fewer and fewer sources about whose motives we can only make educated and cynical guesses.

Back to the Future…

I’m betting not one American in million has heard of William Scott Vare of Pennsylvania, but the pudgy machine politician of the WilliamVareearly 20th Century makes as good an object lesson as any over which to scratch our heads and wonder again what’s happening as a result of the pernicious influence of money – really vast amounts of money – in our politics.

Before Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution reordered the nation’s political map in the 1930’s, Pennsylvania was a dependably Republican state dominated by old style machine politics. The GOP machine chose the candidates, lined up the money, managed the voting and sent its favorites to Harrisburg and Washington. In 1926 it was William Vare’s turn to reach the big time. Vare had spent most of his life moving through the chairs of Pennsylvania politics – Philadelphia city jobs, recorder of deeds, state legislature, then Congress. He was the Republican candidate for the Senate in 1926 when the odor of corruption hanging around him finally wafted into the U.S. Senate.

1101330227_400In a wonderful little essay on the Vare case, the Senate historian says that Mississippi Democratic Senator Pat Harrison took to the Senate floor in 1926 to denounce the influence of vast money involved in the primary election won by Vare in Pennsylvania. “Harrison pointed to reports that a staggering $2 to $5 million had been poured into the campaign and reminded his colleagues that in an earlier election a far smaller amount expended by Michigan’s Truman Newberry had been labeled excessive.” Imagine that. In 1926 the U.S. Senate actually debated whether too much money in a Senate race was a bad thing.

Not only that but after a series of Senate investigations stretching over more than three years, William Scott Vare was denied his seat in the Senate when a strong bi-partisan majority – 66 to 15 – determined that Vare’s vast expenditures from dubious sources were “harmful to the dignity and honor of the Senate.” These were the days before there was much of any type of campaign finance disclosure, but the Senate did determine, big surprise, that most of the money spent in Pennsylvania came from a handful of extremely wealthy individuals, including the Bill Gates of his day Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Imagine that. The Senate actually once policed its own membership when presented with proof that one member had simply spent too much money to secure his election.

A Cancer on Democracy…

One gets the sense that American’s instinctively know that vast, unregulated amounts of money, secretly contributed and used almost exclusively to pummel one candidate or the other is the main ingredient in our politics of cynicism, dysfunction and hyper-partisanship. The numbers back up what instinct suggests:

The recent election involved the expenditure of more than $4 billion, much of it untraceable as to source. The North Carolina Senate race became the nation’s most expensive with $65 million spent. In Arizona, which had an open gubernatorial seat, the outside, “dark” money swamped what the two principle candidates were able to raise and spend. One Arizona reporter said trying to unravel the Andrew-Melonstrands of money resembled “a Russian nesting doll” where every disclosure leads to another mystery.

As if we didn’t already know that a handful of modern day oligarchs – the Andrew Mellon’s of the 21st Century – have come to dominate American politics, the Brookings Institution has produced a helpful guide to the guilty – the U.S. Billionaires Political Power Index. The Index is led by the Koch Brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Sheldon Adelson and on and on. The Koch boys spent $240 million this go round, Bloomberg about $50 million, Steyer about $55 million. Look at the list, see who these folks are supporting and draw your own conclusions about who is shaping American politics and policy.

Republicans had a big day Tuesday and Democrats took a real whipping, but the real winner was money. It may take a few more election cycles for public disgust at all this excess to finally begin to register, but it will happen. Just as William Vare perverted American democracy with vast amounts of money in the 1920’s and Richard Nixon used his secret stashes of campaign cash to try to keep the Watergate burglars from talking in the 1970’s, too much money in politics eventually leads to scandal. It will happen again, perhaps already has happened and we just don’t know yet.

In the post-Watergate period of American politics there were two schools of thought about political money. One view held that the amounts and sources of money should be heavily regulated to prevent politicians from being too beholden to any one source of campaign cash. The other view held that the amounts of money weren’t a problem as long as there was real transparency about where the money came from and how it was spent. Now post-Citizens United the U.S. Supreme Court has left us with neither approach – no limits and no disclosure – and Mitch McConnell can celebrate both his rise to majority leader and the triumph of the kind of unregulated political money that he has long championed.

Rather than limits and sunlight controlling political money the American democracy increasingly resembles Putin’s Russia or a Central American banana republic where a few really, really rich people lavish their money on candidates and causes.

Some will argue that American democracy is so resilient that it can withstand the corrupting nature of too much money from too few people, and one hopes against all evidence of how human nature works that such might be the case. What the system cannot survive, however, is a growing belief among the voters that their individual role in the process is being systematically replaced by the ability of a few billionaires to write massive checks to advance their own narrow, special and personal interests. That is not democracy, but we are about to see what it does to democracy.