"Let the People Rule"?

"'The whole Trump phenomenon isn't because of our reforms,' he says. 'It's not just our fault, I think.' GOP gerrymandering and changes to state primaries happened on their own, he notes. He also points to many other new factors involved, including social media, generational change and Covid. He adds that in the years since Trump has entered politics, the former president has succeeded in co-opting the GOP establishment: 'If the Republican Party had superdelegates today, they would be on his side.'"

Michael Hirsh at Politico asks, "Did a Young Democratic Activist in 1968 Pave the Way for Donald Trump?"

"A Job Guarantee Threatens Corporate Power, While an Income Guarantee Subsidizes It"

"Over the last month, progressives have been celebrating the legislation recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, calling for a pilot job guarantee in 15 cities and regions, co-sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. But this bill preempts universal job guarantee legislation being drawn up by Bernie Sanders and rejects even the limited job guarantee advocated by the Center for American Progress, suggesting that Democratic leaders still do not understand the severity of the problem. Those excited by the idea ought to remember, too, that it was liberals, not conservatives, who have killed job guarantee bills in the past."

Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes at The New Republic traces the "Long, Tortured History of the Job Guarantee."

"The Source of the Triple-A Attack Line"

"The smear is being mentioned in some of McGovern's obituaries, but most of these leave out the phrase's weird provenance, which remained a secret until 2007. In that year, Robert Novak revealed its source (in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington) to be none other than Sen. Tom Eagleton."

In a 2012 New Republic article, Timothy Noah explains how George McGovern "became the candidate of Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion."

"What Would Happen If Trump Quit?"

"At the national level, the rules (it’s actually in RNC rule No. 9) are reasonably clear: If a presidential nominee dies or withdraws, the RNC is empowered to replace her or him via one of two methods: (1) a vote by the RNC itself in which each state would cast the same number of votes as it possessed at the recent national convention, or (2) an actual reconvening of said convention.

"There would obviously be significant pressure on the RNC from the abandoned Trump supporters to follow the latter route so they could nominate Jeff Sessions or Gary Busey or whomever. But it would be a logistical and political nightmare. Besides, why should the RNC defer to the same delegates who made such a poor choice the first time around?"

 

Ed Kilgore explores these questions at New York.

"Electorally Speaking, Vice Presidential Candidates Seem to Matter at the Margins"

"If Clinton and Trump are wise, it will be those candidates who populate their shortlists–rather than gimmicks and 'game changers.'"

Mark Z. Barabak in the Los Angeles Times interviews Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko, authors of The VP Advantage: How Running Mates Influence Home State Voting in Presidential Elections.

"It Didn't Have to Be That Way"

"The danger of the backstabbing myth that Nixon spun in No More Vietnams is that it paves the way for more Vietnams. Today, no politician wants to be accused of losing Iraq or Afghanistan. That doesn't mean any of them (or their civilian and military advisers) have ever come up with a way to win either war. Nixonian myth, however, gives them a politically acceptable alternative to admitting failure. They can hold up the false hopes that training and equipping the local armies will enable them to replace American soldiers and that a political settlement will reconcile parties who have demonstrated their inclination to fight out their differences. The cost of false hope is measured in lost and shattered lives.
"Fortunately, Nixon's myth is shattered by the evidence on Nixon's tapes and in his White House documents.


Salon runs an excerpt from Ken Hughes's Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection.

One Bright Shining Moment

"To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics."

David E. Rosenbaum in The New York Times reports the death of George McGovern.

Rick Perlstein at The New Republic compares McGovern's past with the present.

"Look Less at Yourself and More at Each Other"

"Mr. Shriver was never elected to any national office. To political insiders, his calls for public service in the 1960s seemed quixotic at a time when America was caught up in a war in Vietnam, a cold war with the Soviet Union and civil rights struggles and urban riots at home. But when the fogs of war and chaos cleared years later, he was remembered by many as a last vestige of Kennedy-era idealism."

Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times reports the death of R. Sargent Shriver.

"A Thousand Percent”

"Perhaps Senator McCain knew everything that has, with dizzying suddenness, emerged about his vice presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska—that she was a director of a political committee in support of Ted Stevens, the Alaska senator now under indictment; an initial supporter of the so-called bridge to nowhere; an appointer of a man who had been officially reprimanded for sexual harassment as the public safety commissioner in Alaska; a mother of an unwed and pregnant 17-year-old; and other things being ferreted out by the minute. But it is an insult to Senator McCain’s intelligence to think even half of these or other matters were known to him before he chose her."

When pondering Sarah Palin, Garry Wills in The New York Times remembers Thomas Eagleton in 1972.

Up from Liberaltarianism

"Note that almost all of the policy proposals that excite the American public are exactly the sort of old-fashioned, 'paleoliberal' spending programs or systems of government regulation that are supposed to be obsolete in this era of privatization, deregulation and free-market globalization, according to neoliberals and libertarians. Bill Clinton to the contrary, the public clearly does not think that 'the era of big government is over.' Nor does the public show any interest in the laundry lists of teeny-weeny tax credits for this and that that neoliberals love to propose, to appear compassionate without spending real money. The public wants the middle-class welfare state to be rounded out by a few major additions--chiefly, healthcare and childcare--and the public also wants the government to grow the economy by investing in public works and favoring companies that locate their production facilities inside the U.S. There, in a sentence, is a program for a neo-Rooseveltian party that could effect an epochal realignment in American politics."

Michael Lind in Salon offers a way forward for an emerging Democratic majority.

One of Us

"And he knows how to conjure the characters you’ve never heard of as well as the ones you expect. Not only Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and the rest of the Chicago Seven defendants, but Thomas Aquinas Foran, one of the prose­cutors in the case, a pal of (the by-now-murdered) Bobby Kennedy and a living embodiment of backlash. Not only John Lindsay, the media darling whose disastrous mayoralty helped run New York City into a ditch—Perlstein quotes a New York Times op-ed describing Central Park under Lindsay as 'a combination of decadence and barbarism; a cut-rate FelliniSatyricon'—but Barry Gray, the father of talk radio, who had crusaded against McCarthyism in the ’50s but attacked Lindsay from the right over law and order when the mayor, amid riots, tried to impose a Civilian Complaint Review Board on the NYPD. Not just George McGovern, who chaired the commission that took the Democratic Party away from the union leaders and urban bosses, but Fred Dutton, the commission intellectual who envisioned a new Democratic coalition shorn of blue-collar reactionaries and anchored by the votes of minorities and newly enfranchised 20-somethings."

In The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has an early review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Thomas J. Sugrue reviews the book in The Nation.

The Legacy of the New Politics

Benjamin Ross in an article from the spring 2003 Dissent Magazine presents a contemporary legacy of 1972's New Politics.