BROWN: Embrace of Barack a repudiation of Bill
By Peter Brown, Special to the Rocky
Published August 26, 2008 at 8:34 p.m.
History, we are told, often repeats itself. That’s why it’s fitting that the Democrats will nominate Barack Obama for president in Denver tomorrow night, and not Hillary Clinton.
Exactly 100 years ago the Democrats last met in the Mile High City and nominated the Barack Obama of that era for president.
His name was William Jennings Bryan and he moved the Democratic Party from a more conservative post-Civil War bent into a populist direction that eventually led to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Obama’s nomination over Clinton represents more than a personal rejection of her and her husband by the party they brought out of the presidential wilderness in 1992.
It is a repudiation of how Bill Clinton remade the Democratic Party.
And, it shows just how fleeting success can be in politics.
Four year ago Bill Clinton was a god at the Democratic convention as the last Democratic president.
Even those who didn’t like his White House extracurricular activities thought him a political genius. They assumed his hand would guide Hillary to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and probably the presidency.
But what is most interesting about the legacy of Bill Clinton, who will get his spot before the cameras at the Democratic convention tonight, is just how thoroughly his party has rejected his way of winning the White House.
Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, nor has he tried to be.
However, his takeover of the Democratic Party and moving it in a strongly populist — the Republicans use the word liberal — direction is reminiscent of Bryan’s efforts a century ago.
Bryan, like Obama, spent a big chunk of his life in Illinois, and was the best political orator of his times. At 36, he was the youngest presidential nominee of either of the major political parties in 1896, 11 years younger than Obama today.
Bryan, nominated in 1896, 1900 and 1908, was a peacenik of his day, opposing military conflicts and U.S. intervention in other countries’ affairs. He railed against corporations as benefiting at the expense of the little guy and wanted much more government taxation and regulation of business.
He fought the free-market notion of survival of the fittest, and was perhaps best known as the champion of free silver, which would have lifted the debt burden on average folks at the expense of the banks and their brethren.
His rhetoric was fiery and, like Obama, moved the masses.
His pledge that “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” was the early 20th century version of Obama’s “Yes we can.”
Obama’s call for higher taxes on the rich, opposition to the Iraq war and pledge to force the oil companies to redistribute part of their profits to consumers via a windfall profits tax is a platform that would make Jennings proud.
And, Obama’s agenda represents a shift from the more centrist way Clinton campaigned for president and governed during his eight years in office.
Not a Southern moderate like Clinton and Jimmy Carter (from 1976-’80 as president, if not now), Obama follows a long line of mostly Northern liberals in the mold of John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and Walter Mondale, all of whom Democrats nominated for president — and lost.
Obama had the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate last year, according to the nonpartisan National Journal. Unlike Clinton, who sought opportunities to challenge liberal orthodoxy — welfare reform that requires recipients to work for benefits is one example — Obama refuses to trim his ideological sails. A year ago the political gurus believed that if any candidate would wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton they would have to run to her right. But Obama won going to her left and finding a large enough constituency of voters who embraced his promise of change.
William Jennings Bryan would be proud.
Bill Clinton less so, regardless of what he says tonight.
But Clinton was twice elected president, and Bryan lost three times.
We’ll see about Obama.
Peter A. Brown, formerly the chief political writer for Scripps Howard, is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal online.
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August 27, 2008
3:17 p.m.
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Raynor writes:
He may turn out to be a terrific president, but Obama's no Bryan. His populism's much more superficial. It's a device he's using to get himself elected. He has, in fact, already moved far from his liberal/populist track record, toward the center, as he's transitioned from primary to general election.
...and his supporters should hope so, as Bryan never did get elected.
August 27, 2008
5:20 p.m.
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T1anda writes:
Even though he's trying to convince his starry eyed followers and independents...Obama's NO JFK either!!!
Far from it!!!!
August 27, 2008
6:01 p.m.
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bookemdano writes:
It's beyond me how a razor thin victory based on caucus states is a "repudiation" of anything. Give me a break.
August 27, 2008
7:29 p.m.
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FCZ writes:
Know Enough?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89m0p...
August 28, 2008
5:48 a.m.
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bluecollarbytes writes:
Obama is also pushing notions of "free silver". And he's trying to do it on the backs of all those evil big businesses who only exploit the "working classes". What will Obama be when he loses? That will mark the comeback of the Clintons. Obama will go back to being the inexperienced Senator from Illinois. We ain't seen nuttin yet in the Democrat civil war. Obama the loser will try to retain his dwindling power while the Clintons will be preparing for 2012.
August 28, 2008
7:22 a.m.
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Johnny_S writes:
The parallels between this era and that one go far deeper than you mentioned. That was the era of 'malefactors of great wealth,' as Teddy Roosevelt memorably put it, and of corporate wealth controlling federal and state legislatures and even the Presidency. (Is it so different today?)
That Gilded Age was the last time the top 1% of Americans 'earned' more than 30% of American national income, before now, and owned nearly half (then, fully half) of all American wealth. By 2005, according to the IRS, the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans.
(IRS data: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/bus...)
That was an era torn by international military adventures of dubious provenance (then the Philippines, today Iraq.) It was an era convulsed by waves of immigrants who didn't speak English or share many American beliefs, then Catholicism and Judaism, and by criminal organizations dominated by the aliens. It was a time of frightening instability in the credit market - then, Free Silver versus 'hard' money, now, well, let's hope the credit crisis mostly ends with mortgages. We both have ferocious debates over the drug that might be destroying American society - only then, it was Demon Rum, and today, it's meth. (Does anyone really demonize pot any more?) And of course, then and now, the religious right thought that, despite all this, polarizing religious credal issues were the real threat - then, is man descended from apes? Now, abortion and gay marriage. Though, in Kansas and a few other places, it's still evolution too.
Plus ca change.....
(Maybe it's no coincidence that the forces of light are once again calling themselves 'Progressive.')
August 28, 2008
9:16 a.m.
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robbyr2 writes:
1992 is not 2008. The world is an entirely different place. The country is a different place. Particularly after January 20, 2001. Mr. Brown seems to think that different times do not call for different answers. We have now tried the Reagan economic model for 28 years. We know where we are now and it isn't pretty.
By 1908, Bryan was just seen as out-of-touch. Although Roosevelt was not unlike Bush in foreign policy, even fighting a guerilla war to maintain our colonialist hold over the Phillippines, on the economic front, he understood that the strength of America lies in its middle class, and its concern for the welfare of the less fortunate. As a Republican he changed the way American business did its business, and made it clean up its act. Industrialists raised wages to make sure Americans could buy what they wanted to sell. By 1908, things were much better for the middle and lower classes than they had been in 1896 (that was when the Democrats really did repudiate the strike-breaking Cleveland).
Americans may be different than the Russians, or the French, or the Iranians, but we aren't immune to the societal disruption created by great economic equality. Even conservatives used to be concerned about the lack of a middle class and the wide disparities between rich and poor in Latin American countries (I went to a very conservative college). Well, with a couple of exceptions, we have a greater disparity of wealth than Latin America.
And Mr. Brown knows better than to call Al Gore a loser because he was a liberal. Technically, he probably lost in the electoral college. We could spend a lot of time discussing things we need to change in electing presidents- the need for regional primaries and NO caucuses, and the need to elminate the electoral college- but that's another post.