|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
Eisenhower's 1956 Message Lost on Today's Misguided Republican Party |
Current rating: 0 |
by Bill Gallagher
(No verified email address) |
03 Aug 2004
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower was everything George W. Bush is not. Ike was self-made, accomplished, worldly and thoughtful. He would find George W.'s impetuous, visceral, bullying approach to the world reckless and foolhardy. Bush's disdain for the United Nations, our NATO allies, and really any nation that took issue with his obsession with Iraq would leave Ike chilled. In his acceptance speech at the 1956 Republican National Convention, Eisenhower spoke of the heart of collective security resting on the principle that strength is not military strength alone. |
John Kerry and the Democrats are off to a good start and their convention provided some fine speeches and messages that should resonate with the American people. But the most intriguing and perhaps best speech I heard last week came from a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The joys of channel-surfing and C-Span brought me to Ike's acceptance speech when nominated for a second term at the 1956 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Eisenhower spoke eloquently about the future of his party in that year when the GOP was marking its 100th anniversary. Many sensible themes Eisenhower offered that night could provide the Democrats of today with messages appealing especially to independent voters and older Americans. Kerry did well in his speech, pointing to the need to depart from Bush's disastrous deceptions.
"We have it in our power to change the world again, but only if we're true to our ideals and that starts by telling the truth to the American people," the Democratic nominee said in his acceptance speech. "That is my first pledge to you tonight. As president, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House."
Other Democrats offered views on the truth-challenged Bush administration and how the serial lying has eroded the quality of our democracy and insults the nature of our republic. Former President Jimmy Carter pointed right at Bush's misleading the American people into a war of choice.
"Truth is the foundation of our global leadership, but our credibility has been shattered," Carter said. "Without truth, without trust, America cannot flourish. Trust is at the very heart of our democracy, the sacred covenant between the president and the people. When that trust is violated, the bonds that hold our republic together begin to weaken."
Barack Obama, the keynote speaker and Democratic candidate for the Senate from Illinois, did a fine job of describing the poisonous political atmosphere Bush and company have created.
"In the end, that's what this election is all about: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? ... This country will reclaim its promise and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come," he said.
Former President Bill Clinton reminded delegates that both candidates are strong men who love their country but have markedly different views of the world.
"Our nominee, John Kerry, favors shared responsibility, shared opportunities, and more global cooperation, and their president and their party in Congress favor concentrated wealth and power, leaving people to fend for themselves and more unilateral action," Clinton said. He also reminded us that national unity is poison for Republican plans: "They need a divided America."
Dwight Eisenhower's view was that the Republican Party should be inclusive and inviting for all Americans.
He said, "The Republican Party is the party of the future because it is the party that draws people together, not drives people apart."
Karl Rove, President Bush's political brain, and the right-wing religious wackos he uses as his surrogates for division would drive Eisenhower right out of their Republican Party.
Ike also said on that night in San Francisco, "Our party detests the technique of pitting group against group for cheap political advantage."
That strategy, sadly, has become the mantra of a Republican Party Ike certainly did not envision and would find repugnant. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is playing the division game in earnest. According to a report in "The Hill," Gingrich is out drumming up wedge issues and encouraging Republicans in Congress to pounce on anything that will divide to gain temporary advantage over the Democrats.
One GOP legislator told "The Hill" that "Gingrich encouraged Republicans to pick issues such as school prayer, strengthening work requirements for welfare recipients, and barring the United Nations from monitoring U.S. elections." Gingrich and his comrades are looking for anything where they can show a contrast. They'll include with the above gay rights and gay marriage, flag-burning, and anything else they can come up with to paint the Democrats as out of touch with mainstream America on a variety of cultural and social issues. This politics of desperation is an attempt to divert the public's attention from the mess in Iraq, the sputtering economy and Bush's horrific record on job creation.
Dwight Eisenhower was everything George W. Bush is not. Ike was self-made, accomplished, worldly and thoughtful. He would find George W.'s impetuous, visceral, bullying approach to the world reckless and foolhardy. Bush's disdain for the United Nations, our NATO allies, and really any nation that took issue with his obsession with Iraq would leave Ike chilled. In his acceptance speech at the 1956 Republican National Convention, Eisenhower spoke of the heart of collective security resting on the principle that strength is not military strength alone.
He said, "It lies rather in the unity that comes of the voluntary association of nations which, however diverse, are developing their own capacities and asserting their own national destinies in a world of freedom and mutual respect." And with the experience of a man who had seen the horrors of war firsthand and knew the limitations of military actions, he added, "There can be no enduring peace for any nation while other nations suffer privation, oppression and a sense of injustice and despair."
And in words that would make George W. cringe, Eisenhower urged that the Republican Party of the future "must be completely dedicated to peace, as indeed must all Americans. For without peace there is no future."
Eisenhower, who classically reminded us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex as he left office, would find the Bush-Cheney melding of foreign policy and military action for the profit of their corporate clients appalling and dangerous. It would grieve him that the very unholy alliances he warned us of had literally taken control of the Republican Party.
As Bush and company look for more weapons systems and reasons to justify their use, Eisenhower provided us with a far more restrained, prudent and realistic vision of the use of armaments as instruments of America's dominant role in the world.
He told the 1956 GOP Convention, "We have worked unceasingly for the promotion of effective steps in disarmament so that the labor of men could with confidence be devoted to their own improvement rather than wasted in the building of engines of destruction."
A line like that at George Bush's second nominating convention would get the speaker booed off the podium.
All Americans would do well to heed Eisenhower's vision and reflect again on the great sense he made nearly half a century ago. The youngest Americans who actually voted for Ike are now 70 and over, but that's one of the fastest-growing segments of our population. They and other Americans who find the sensible moderation of the great warrior who became president appealing can still find a political voice. Eisenhower protected our nation and kept us strong during some of the most difficult days of the Cold War, but he did that soberly and intelligently. The Republican Party under George W. Bush has ventured far away from what Eisenhower envisioned.
"I like Ike" was one of the favorite GOP slogans in the '50s. Those who feel like that this year can find a home with John Kerry and the Democrats.
Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman.
©2004 The Niagara Falls Reporter
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
|
On Both Sides of the Atlantic, Progressives Could be Braver |
by Martin Kettle
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
03 Aug 2004
|
Six years ago, the American sociologist Alan Wolfe published a strikingly important book. Entitled One Nation, After All, and subtitled What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About, it is an essential text for understanding the pulse of modern America. What makes it both important and essential is that Wolfe painted a picture radically at odds with the exaggerated perception, both in the US and abroad, of America as a nation of entrenched and embattled ideological extremes. In fact, Wolfe argued that middle America was not so much a land of culture wars as of cultural pragmatism. "I have found little support for the notion that middle-class Americans" - a category within which three quarters of all Americans define themselves - "are engaged in bitter cultural conflict with each other over the proper way to live," he observed.
"Reluctant to pass judgment, [Americans] are tolerant to a fault," he concluded. "Not about everything - they have not come to accept homosexuality as normal and they intensely dislike bilingualism - but about a surprising number of things, including rapid transformations in the family, legal immigration, multicultural education and the separation of church and state. Above all moderate in their outlook on the world, they believe in the importance of leading a virtuous life, but are reluctant to impose values they understand as virtuous for themselves on others; strong believers in morality, they do not want to be considered moralists."
Wolfe's book came out at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and his findings were vindicated by the response of public opinion to the president's misdemeanors. While Republican fanatics used the affair to try to drive the president from the White House, moderate middle America failed to rise to their bait. Instead they kept Clinton's wrongdoings in proportion and rallied behind him, just as a reading of Wolfe's book suggested they might.
But that was then. Today, in election year, the talk is of a deeply divided nation, of a Disraelian Two Americas, to quote the title of a recent book by the pollster Stanley Greenberg. Six years on, in the wake of the split-down-the-middle presidential election of November 2000, in the light of the ideological drivings of the Bush administration and, above all, in the confrontational aftermath of Iraq, how does Wolfe's late-1990s vision of a tolerant consensual America stand up?
When I put this question to him last week, Wolfe argued that the past four years have confirmed rather than destroyed the essential thesis of his book. By any standard, he reckons, Americans are less divided in their view of life, the nation and the world, than they were in the past. One nation, after all, again.
The essence of Wolfe's case is that the great wedge issues of the late 20th-century culture wars have simply shrunk in significance. The most important of these, as always, is affirmative action on race, where the supreme court has managed to strike a sensible compromise. Nor, he argues, does abortion still have the divisive potential of the past, though if a re-elected Bush attempts to nominate a supreme court dedicated to overturning the landmark pro-abortion Roe vs Wade judgment of 1973, that could change. Having won the political argument over what it calls partial birth abortion, though, Wolfe reckons the right is less angry than it was.
There's much about America in 2004 that bears this out. Over the past couple of months, the president has spent $50m on campaign ads designed to promote his opposition to gay marriage. As Wolfe's original research found, gay equality remains one of the issues on which middle America remains to be convinced; yet you would have to search long and hard to find many people who believe that gay marriage is the great dividing issue in America. At the margins, Bush's advertising may help to motivate some social conservatives to vote Republican, but mostly it has sunk without trace.
Which brings us to the paradox. If Wolfe is right, even in 2004, and most Americans are indeed part of the shared values of One America, then how does this square with an electorate that, according to most of the current opinion polling, is now so sharply into Two Americas?
A possible explanation is that the polarisation of 2000 and 2004 is simply untypical - most US presidential elections are not nearly so close as the last one was and the next one promises to be. In that case, some special factor - the disabling effect of the Clinton scandals on the Democratic cause in 2000, perhaps, or the mistrust towards Bush's Iraq policy and his tax cuts this time around - may have made these two contests more impassioned than they might otherwise have been.
A second is that the practices of modern campaigning and media - giving voters a relentlessly inaccurate picture of the choices they face, presenting their own candidate in an unbelievably favourable light and their opponent in an equally unbelievably negative light - conspire to create a polarised contest between core electorates and to drive down participation. As US journalist Jack Germond says in his new memoir, the Republicans do not have a monopoly on such tactics - they just seem better at it.
There is, of course, a third possibility: that Wolfe's "one nation" theory is just wrong. In the end, though, a complete explanation surely also involves a critical assessment of the tactics of the Democrats, in particular the intellectual defensiveness that EJ Dionne, in another necessary new book, Stand Up Fight Back, dubs "the politics of accommodation" and which Garry Wills, in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books, describes as Clinton's legacy of "omnidirectional proneness to pusillanimity and collapse".
Dionne's answer has lessons not just for the Democrats but for the Labour party. His argument is that progressive parties must not be so fearful about affirming the traditions from which they come, while simultaneously recognising that the tradition is "pragmatic, experimental and open to new approaches". In the US, writes Dionne, this means being more explicit about government's role to help the worse off, protecting the courts from rightwing judges, reforming the campaign finance laws, promoting "tolerant traditionalism" in social policy while, in international affairs, adopting a vigilant optimistic "Lockean" strategy based on alliances, democracy and justice.
Reading Wolfe, there is little doubt that this meshes with the "mature patriotism" and "tempered internationalism" which characterise middle-class America's view of the world and that a campaign based on such approaches would make Bush's re-election much more difficult. Will it happen? There were signs in Boston last week that John Kerry has begun to embrace some of this. But the picture is incomplete, there is a long way to go and - as Germond reminds us - the Republicans are very good, and very ruthless, campaigners.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |
|
