By JONATHAN MARTIN
AS mainstream and Tea Party Republicans wrestle for control of their party, it might be wise over the holidays for each faction to crack open a pair of recent books that recount previous episodes of internecine political combat.
In his memoir “The New Democrats and the Return to Power,” Al From, the founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, recalls dragging his party away from the left amid a string of presidential losses during the 1980s. And the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in “The Bully Pulpit,” describes the friendship and eventual rivalry between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft that cost the Republicans the White House in 1912 and led to a split in the party that lasted decades.
However disparate they may be, these two seasons of political soul searching, one a century ago and the other a quarter century ago, have echoes in the current Republican clash over the best course for reviving their party’s fortunes. Like Mr. From’s Democrats after the 1988 White House race, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. In much the same fashion as Ms. Goodwin describes their political ancestors, Republicans are grappling with how to respond to a changing country without angering an old-guard base and rupturing the party. Both moments offer an instructive lesson to Republicans as they enter a midterm election year: As painful as it may be, it is better to have your differences out now than during the next presidential election.
“My old mentor Gillis Long told me that if you are not willing to spill blood between elections, you’ll spill in it on Election Day, and it’ll be yours,” Mr. From said in an interview, referring to the former Democratic representative from Louisiana.
Few campaigns illustrate that aphorism better than the one in 1912.
Up to that point, Republicans had lost only two presidential campaigns, going back to the Civil War. But after fulfilling a pledge to not run in 1908 for what would have effectively been a third term, Roosevelt ceded the nomination to Taft and with it a fragile hold on the party’s two main wings: the upstart progressives and the party’s traditional laissez-faire wing. The division between the two groups grew wider and finally became irreparable in 1912, when Roosevelt challenged his old friend and the sitting president for the nomination.
Ms. Goodwin posits that had he run for re-election in 1908, Roosevelt could have kept the party together and moved it further toward progressivism.
“There is no doubt that if Teddy would have run again in 1908 he would have won,” said Ms. Goodwin, noting that “in 1910 many progressive Republicans won, especially in the West.”
The combination, she argued, of Roosevelt’s forceful personality along with the generational turnover taking place in the party, where older conservatives were being replaced with progressives, may have been enough for Republicans to have reoriented themselves and averted the agony of 1912.
Instead, by choosing to challenge Taft, Roosevelt himself initiated what he called “the biggest fight the Republican Party has been in since the Civil War.”
Roosevelt called Taft “a fathead” and said he possessed “the brains of a guinea pig.” The incumbent was equally tough, suggesting that Roosevelt wanted to stay in power for “perhaps the rest of his natural life.” “The rhetoric was much worse than what we’re seeing now between the mainstream Republicans and the Tea Party,” said Ms. Goodwin.
It was not merely words. At state and local Republican conventions in 1912, there were dynamite explosions, scenes of Taft supporters wielding clubs and baseball bats and even of a supporter of Roosevelt holding a loaded gun to the head of a leader of a Taft delegation.
Later, at the national convention in Chicago, fistfights broke out in the galleries between delegates. It was clear that their internal divisions would prove fatal in November. Or, as one former Republican senator put it of Taft and Roosevelt, “The only question now is which corpse gets the most flowers.”
Roosevelt, apparently recognizing he had erred by not running for re-election in 1908, would eventually say he would cut off his hand to take that pledge back.
Eighty years later, when the Democrats recaptured the White House after losing the previous three presidential races, there was no titanic battle for the soul of the party. That is because by the time Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992, he and his fellow centrists had already spent years tugging a party sick of losing toward the middle.
Mr. From founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, one year after the Democrats lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan. “We got criticized for dividing the party,” Mr. From recalled. “But the truth is Walter Mondale in 1984 had a perfectly unified campaign — every interest group was behind him.”
For Democrats then and Republicans now, Mr. From said, the lesson is, “In party politics, unity is very much overrated.”
But, he was quick to add, the Democratic civil war took place outside the context of a presidential campaign; rather, it was fought in hotel corridors and ballrooms where the council’s conferences were held, and on the pages of the country’s newspapers.
Mr. From recalled that the United Auto Workers, angry about the council’s stance on trade, leafleted their 1991 meeting in Cleveland, where the Rev. Jesse Jackson also led a protest. Two years earlier, at a council conference in Philadelphia, Mr. Jackson and Gov. Charles S. Robb of Virginia got into an impromptu debate following a panel, with Mr. Robb arguing that Democrats needed to do more to reach out to the white working-class and middle-class voters they had been losing and Mr. Jackson contending that if they tried to be all things to all people they would be “ill defined, indecisive — kind of like warm spit.”
Besides the demographics’ being reversed, a nearly identical dispute has broken out among Republicans this year following deep losses among young voters, minorities and women in the last two presidential elections. Some in the party advocate taking steps to appeal to such constituencies — passing an immigration overhaul or softening their opposition to gay rights, for example — while more ideological Republicans believe the party can regain a national majority by turning out more of their traditional base.
Either way, they would be better off litigating the matter now and in the midterm elections than in 2016. Mr. From even suggested that Republicans form their own version of a Democratic Leadership Council, so that the center right “has a power center that will do battle with the Tea Party people.”
“They just have to accept some degree of disunity,” he said.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
U.S: ''A Reading List for Feuding Republicans''
By JONATHAN MARTIN
AS mainstream and Tea Party Republicans wrestle for control of their party, it might be wise over the holidays for each faction to crack open a pair of recent books that recount previous episodes of internecine political combat.
In his memoir “The New Democrats and the Return to Power,” Al From, the founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, recalls dragging his party away from the left amid a string of presidential losses during the 1980s. And the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in “The Bully Pulpit,” describes the friendship and eventual rivalry between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft that cost the Republicans the White House in 1912 and led to a split in the party that lasted decades.
However disparate they may be, these two seasons of political soul searching, one a century ago and the other a quarter century ago, have echoes in the current Republican clash over the best course for reviving their party’s fortunes. Like Mr. From’s Democrats after the 1988 White House race, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. In much the same fashion as Ms. Goodwin describes their political ancestors, Republicans are grappling with how to respond to a changing country without angering an old-guard base and rupturing the party. Both moments offer an instructive lesson to Republicans as they enter a midterm election year: As painful as it may be, it is better to have your differences out now than during the next presidential election.
“My old mentor Gillis Long told me that if you are not willing to spill blood between elections, you’ll spill in it on Election Day, and it’ll be yours,” Mr. From said in an interview, referring to the former Democratic representative from Louisiana.
Few campaigns illustrate that aphorism better than the one in 1912.
Up to that point, Republicans had lost only two presidential campaigns, going back to the Civil War. But after fulfilling a pledge to not run in 1908 for what would have effectively been a third term, Roosevelt ceded the nomination to Taft and with it a fragile hold on the party’s two main wings: the upstart progressives and the party’s traditional laissez-faire wing. The division between the two groups grew wider and finally became irreparable in 1912, when Roosevelt challenged his old friend and the sitting president for the nomination.
Ms. Goodwin posits that had he run for re-election in 1908, Roosevelt could have kept the party together and moved it further toward progressivism.
“There is no doubt that if Teddy would have run again in 1908 he would have won,” said Ms. Goodwin, noting that “in 1910 many progressive Republicans won, especially in the West.”
The combination, she argued, of Roosevelt’s forceful personality along with the generational turnover taking place in the party, where older conservatives were being replaced with progressives, may have been enough for Republicans to have reoriented themselves and averted the agony of 1912.
Instead, by choosing to challenge Taft, Roosevelt himself initiated what he called “the biggest fight the Republican Party has been in since the Civil War.”
Roosevelt called Taft “a fathead” and said he possessed “the brains of a guinea pig.” The incumbent was equally tough, suggesting that Roosevelt wanted to stay in power for “perhaps the rest of his natural life.” “The rhetoric was much worse than what we’re seeing now between the mainstream Republicans and the Tea Party,” said Ms. Goodwin.
It was not merely words. At state and local Republican conventions in 1912, there were dynamite explosions, scenes of Taft supporters wielding clubs and baseball bats and even of a supporter of Roosevelt holding a loaded gun to the head of a leader of a Taft delegation.
Later, at the national convention in Chicago, fistfights broke out in the galleries between delegates. It was clear that their internal divisions would prove fatal in November. Or, as one former Republican senator put it of Taft and Roosevelt, “The only question now is which corpse gets the most flowers.”
Roosevelt, apparently recognizing he had erred by not running for re-election in 1908, would eventually say he would cut off his hand to take that pledge back.
Eighty years later, when the Democrats recaptured the White House after losing the previous three presidential races, there was no titanic battle for the soul of the party. That is because by the time Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992, he and his fellow centrists had already spent years tugging a party sick of losing toward the middle.
Mr. From founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, one year after the Democrats lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan. “We got criticized for dividing the party,” Mr. From recalled. “But the truth is Walter Mondale in 1984 had a perfectly unified campaign — every interest group was behind him.”
For Democrats then and Republicans now, Mr. From said, the lesson is, “In party politics, unity is very much overrated.”
But, he was quick to add, the Democratic civil war took place outside the context of a presidential campaign; rather, it was fought in hotel corridors and ballrooms where the council’s conferences were held, and on the pages of the country’s newspapers.
Mr. From recalled that the United Auto Workers, angry about the council’s stance on trade, leafleted their 1991 meeting in Cleveland, where the Rev. Jesse Jackson also led a protest. Two years earlier, at a council conference in Philadelphia, Mr. Jackson and Gov. Charles S. Robb of Virginia got into an impromptu debate following a panel, with Mr. Robb arguing that Democrats needed to do more to reach out to the white working-class and middle-class voters they had been losing and Mr. Jackson contending that if they tried to be all things to all people they would be “ill defined, indecisive — kind of like warm spit.”
Besides the demographics’ being reversed, a nearly identical dispute has broken out among Republicans this year following deep losses among young voters, minorities and women in the last two presidential elections. Some in the party advocate taking steps to appeal to such constituencies — passing an immigration overhaul or softening their opposition to gay rights, for example — while more ideological Republicans believe the party can regain a national majority by turning out more of their traditional base.
Either way, they would be better off litigating the matter now and in the midterm elections than in 2016. Mr. From even suggested that Republicans form their own version of a Democratic Leadership Council, so that the center right “has a power center that will do battle with the Tea Party people.”
“They just have to accept some degree of disunity,” he said.
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