On Thursday, August 30 Mitt Romney will stand stiffly before the RNC less
as a champion and more as an instrument.
Grover Norquist has called for “installing” Romney while others, with
less hubris, just want Mitt to use the provided funds to eject Obama and bring
“stability.” The Romney team has spoken
of James K. Polk—the canny expansionist who worked himself to death—as a model
for his administration. But Romney would
do well to give Ike a second glance, especially before his speech.
It was Eisenhower who was a respected “unifier” (a key word with the Romney campaign) who understood the difference between real and imagined threats in foreign policy (a Romney weakness) and successful wedded entrepreneurial initiative to government investment.
In 1956, after four years of the glorious burden on his already heavily adorned
chest, Eisenhower addressed the Republican National Convention and asked for a
renewal on his White House lease. This
was one of the 20th century Republican Party’s best convention addresses,
spelling out how conservatives could be the party of the future. In a clipped staccato the former Supreme
Allied Commander sounded more ready for morning muster and a jaunty bugle than
a conservative assembly. Admittedly, neither
Ike nor Romney are much good behind the microphone but whether the smoky crowd
knew it or not, Eisenhower was a skilled speech writer. (Imagine the 2012
Republican nominee quoting Ibsen as Ike did!)
Dwight’s dowdy glasses and everyman act was mostly for the obliging cameras. In fact, it was the “simple soldier”
Eisenhower who penned some of the peacock Douglas MacArthur’s most eloquent
remarks.
Ike’s 1956 advice: “If we and our successors are as courageous
and forward-looking and as militantly determined, here under the klieg-lights
of the twentieth century, as Abraham Lincoln and his associates were in the
bonfire-light of the nineteenth, the Republican Party will continue to grow in
the confidence and affection of the American people, not only to November next,
but indeed to, and beyond, its second centennial.”
A Republican President
did preside over the second centennial and Romney’s Republican Party need not
worry about its members being “militantly determined” about anything.
Only Herbert Hoover precedes Romney as a “success” in private
business. But Eisenhower, like Hamilton
and his fellow Federalists and unlike Hoover, understood the power of
government investment and its ability to catalyze dormant entrepreneurial
energy. Eisenhower’s lasting legacy is
beneath the wheels of Romney’s campaign bus as he shuttles from big city to
small towns.
Ike’s 1956 advice: “My friends, there are only a few days left
for registering in a number of our States. That is one thing you cannot defer.
The records show that our registration as compared to former years at this time
is way down across the land--registration across the board. Let's help the
American Heritage, let's help the Boy Scouts, let's help everybody to get
people out to register to vote. Now, of
special relevance, and to me particularly gratifying, is the fact that the
country's young people show a consistent preference for this Administration.
After all, let us not forget, these young people are America's future.
Parenthetically, may I say I shall never cease to hope that the several states
will give them the voting privilege at a somewhat earlier age than is now
generally the case.”
Eisenhower
not only wanted people to vote for him, he wanted people to vote. A candidate Romney will need to illustrate
that he wants all Americans to vote,
not just the ones with this or that ID.
Young people, the elderly, the poor, and minorities are being quietly singled
out of Romney’s vision of American “unity” and his speech could follow Ike’s
prescient words. It was more than a
decade before those old enough to kill Viet Cong were given the ability to
vote. But the Boomerang Generation of millennials—likely
deterred by Romney’s indifference to their mountainous personal debt—endlessly
tweaking their resumes in their parents’ basement are not leaping into his
corner. Romney’s Republican Party cannot
win in a minority-infused future with rhetoric only about burdensome public
debt (much of it from Republican administrations) while remaining silent about
ID laws, the Dream Act, and relief for student debt.
Ike’s 1956 advice: “Our Party as far back as 1856 began
establishing a record of bringing together,. as its largest element, the
working people and small farmers, as well as the small businessmen. It
attracted minority groups, scholars and writers, not to mention reformers of
all kinds, Free-Soilers, Independent Democrats, Conscience Whigs, Barnburners,
"soft Hunkers," teetotallers, vegetarians, and transcendentalists!”
As an aside, can you
imagine a Tea Party rally attended by Thoreau and Emerson? I digress.
Karl Rove has been the Cassandra for conservatives on their lurking
Spanish-speaking problem. Latinos, as
Rove said this week in an interview with Politico, should be Republicans: entrepreneurial in ethic, religious in
belief, and middle-class in aspiration.[1] Romney will need to put down new stakes for
his own vision of conservatism’s big tent while picking up the votes of
upper-middle class whites, a natural constituency, of which he is losing and
without which he cannot win.
Ike’s 1956 advice: “It so important that great
governmental programs be based upon principle rather than upon shifting
political opportunism.”
Romney will need to
seek a measured truce with Planned Parenthood—a group he has pledged to
defund. A reversal and truce would be a
bold challenge to a base already suspicious of his pro-life credentials but
would prevent national discussions of basic women’s health from devolving into
loose talk of baby murder. It would
counteract the Aken effect. Can an
“installed” Romney have enough leadership and vision to prevent his party’s Tea
Party quarter—in the name of principle—from holding up people’s unemployment
checks over petty budgetary squabbles?
Ike’s 1956 advice: “My second reason for saying
that the Republican Party is the Party of the Future is this: It is the Party
which concentrates on the facts and issues of today and tomorrow, not the facts
and issues of yesterday.”
While Romney’s “Restore
our Future” smacks of the Bourbons snatching a crown beside a tumbrel, Ike’s
party (like today’s conservatives) had a Republican-fueled depression to
account for and run away from.
To “restore” America to an anti-regulatory agenda after so much
irresponsibility in government and recklessness on Wall Street is
unserious. If Obama’s tactics are to
keep silent about his first-term’s legislation than Romney will need to
contrast that blank screen with bold colors.
But Republicans stump speeches have the feel of a party dry of ideas;
predictable invocations of principles are no substitute for –as Eisenhower knew—using
government as a mechanism for public investment and stable growth. Why must Romney’s restoration only be of an
80’s-style supply-side agenda? Reagan
raised taxes and even George W. Bush requested a stimulus.
Ike’s 1956 advice: “With two-thirds of us living in big cities,
questions of urban organization and redevelopment must be given high priority.
Highest of all, perhaps, will be the priority of first-class education to meet
the demands of our swiftly growing school-age population.”
Ike’s
administration saw an escalation in the Great Migration of African-Americans
off the land and into the cities.
Republicans will need to acknowledge the challenges of today’s “great
inversion” now underway: the reverse
flow of people with capital into cities and the flushing of lower-income people
out. To claim a future for the
Republicans, Romney will need to speak candidly to a conservative base in the
south and west about the future of cities.
Ike was also a Republican who integrated public schools and thought they
could be the incubators of future knowledge and wisdom; Romney cannot ignore
public education nor only deploy the word “union” beside the word “boss.” Ike himself believed in the principle of
collective bargaining without interference as “the cornerstone of the American
philosophy of labor-management relations.”
Ike’s 1956 advice: “What is more, the Republican Party's record
on social justice rests, not on words and promises, but on accomplishment. The
record shows that a wide range of quietly effective actions, conceived in
understanding and good will for all, has brought about more genuine--and often
voluntary--progress toward equal justice and opportunity in the last three
years than was accomplished in all the previous twenty put together.
Elimination of various kinds of discrimination in the Armed Services, the
District of Columbia, and among the employees of government contractors
provides specific examples of this progress.”
Yes, Social Justice was the name of Father
Coughlin’s pamphlet. And yes Glenn
Beck’s ramblings have pitted dittoheads against the phrase. But the Republicans were once the party of
Lincoln, a cautious strategist, rhetorical abolitionist, and also one who
understood using government power to reformulate a nation in trouble. The invocation of “social justice” by a
Republican today could take the sting out of the scorpion and return political argument
to individual interests and national aspirations instead of rejecting or
ignoring public work. And obviously
Eisenhower was not entirely deaf to minority concerns though no fiery reformer. Meanwhile, Romney’s 0% rating among
African-Americans is not only shameful, but strategically short-sighted. How can a party combat a history of “southern
strategies” “dog whistling” and talk of “welfare queens” with no
African-American tab on the Republican website?
Ike’s 1956 advice: We must insure a fair chance to such people
as mature workers who have trouble getting jobs, older citizens with problems
of health, housing, security and recreation, migratory farm laborers and
physically-handicapped workers. We have with us, also, problems involving
American Indians, low-income farmers and laborers, women who sometimes do not
get equal pay for equal work, small businessmen, and employers and workers in
areas which need special assistance for redevelopment.
For Mitt Romney to even
mention some of these phrases would be a step forward. Romney could address youth underemployment
and those millions of Baby Boomers caught at the end of their careers who,
after being dumped overboard, are overqualified and under-supported. Leadership on women in the workplace would
intensify a constituency of aspiring and powerful women and counteract liberal
monopoly on notions of “equality” and recent talk of a “war on women.”
Ike’s 1956 advice: “Science and technology, labor-saving
methods, management, labor organization, education, medicine--and not least,
politics and government.-all these have brought within our grasp a world in
which backbreaking toil and longer hours will not be necessary.”
Sadly, rapidity has only accelerated work, not diminished its
amount. Romney, as a businessman, could
address the extraordinary productivity of the American worker and their
deplorable lack of compensation. The
resulting squeeze is choking demand and evaporating the American dream
conservatives rely upon as a basis of social order. No investment in training or education and no
discussion of the great divergence—itself partially brought on by the
technological revolution—condemns a future generation to “electronic
sweatshops” in call- centers and other short-sighted service-oriented
labor. It also will allow the slow bleed
of white collar knowledge jobs to an increasingly educated and cheaper
developing world. President Eisenhower, a recent and formidable persona Romney
could emulate told his fellow conservatives in 1956 that “constant change
without principle becomes chaos.” Polls
by the Financial Times showing half
of people have
a negative view towards globalization illustrates a disconnect between how
elites and workers feel about rapid free trade.[2]
After all, the ripping
torrent hollowing out blue collar small towns and now white collar home
ownership and job security in the suburbs is frankly not felt at the top. How
could it be? Can Romney detail a
globalizing economy—one that asks workers to train their foreign replacements—a
little less mordant?
In
sum, the winding political path Romney has taken testifies to the identity
crisis among conservatives, unsure what they want to conserve but far-sighted
on what they wish to destroy.
Romney may want to
emulate Polk, but I think he should like Ike.
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