Comments on: Nixonland: The Panel

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:43:06 +0000

I am glad we still Carter around to whip and revise around. Did you know Judas and Jimmy both start with “J”?

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:19:25 +0000

All that said, I am being flippant here. I do think there is such a dynamic and it is a serious problem, but it is one of many factors.

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:07:28 +0000

LFC, I don’t think that contradicts my point. Progressives may not have liked Carter, but they voted for him, in the General, because they had no choice. And he betrayed them, as they thought he would. The thing is that Carter has been painted as the ultimate liberal President, when, from what I gather, a lot of Democrats and, yes, even progressives backed him because McGovern had fallen so hard that they thought a real liberal could not win. I don’t think that fair, as McGovern had his own party stabbing him in the back, but so it goes. Carter could screw the liberals at the last time liberals were strong in this country, and what could they do? OK, they tried a primary challenge, but that just ended up helping Reagan. The structure lends itself to this kind of screw-the-base activity on both sides.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:05:43 +0000

Henry, what about uploading to mediafire? That’s relatively simple. You do have to set up an account. Thanks again.

By: LFC

LFC — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:27:10 +0000

And as an addendum to my point, Martin Bento @2 above is I think wrong to suggest that Carter “betrayed the progressives,” b/c the large majority of progressives didn’t support him in the first place. They held their noses and voted for him as the lesser evil compared to Gerald Ford, and that was it. Yes, there were exceptions, and yes, some liberals/progressives did serve in his administration (e.g. in the human rts bureau at State Dept), but for the most part, progressives were not Carter fans. Indeed, this was one of the factors that pushed Kennedy to make his ill-fated 1980 primary challenge to Carter.

By: Henry

Henry — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:05:18 +0000

Phil – I have it as a WMA (that’s what my Olympus does), but can’t put it up cos it would trash my bandwidth – it is 20 odd megs. I thought about trying to seed it via BitTorrent, but that’s above my pay grad/technical competence …

By: LFC

LFC — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:03:58 +0000

Paul Pierson says that the trend toward expanding govt stopped in 1978, after the Dems recaptured the White House in ‘76, ergo this is a piece of evidence that electoral politics and policy regimes are disconnected. To which I say: which Democrat recaptured the White House in 1976? Not Mo Udall, not the resolutely redistributionist—and I mean redistributionist—Fred Harris, whose whole Dem primary campaign in 76 revolved around the need for a more equal distribution of wealth, income, and opportunity. No, the candidate who won was Jimmy Carter, non-ideological, utterer of pablum, “I’ll never lie to you” Jimmy Carter. I remember the 76 campaign very well, and I doubt very much that the fact that Carter won and the fact that progressive legislative initiatives were defeated shortly thereafter are incompatible facts, as Paul Pierson wants them to be. Rather, the whole point of Carter’s campaign, as I recall it, was that he was not a standard-issue liberal Democrat but a new kind of Democrat, less wedded to ‘old’ assumptions and more willing to consider and even push things like deregulation. One of his economic advisors was Alfred Kahn, a leader in the push for airline deregulation, if I recall correctly. Even Ted Kennedy, perhaps sensing where the winds were blowing in this period, supported deregulation of the trucking industry, IIRC. So maybe Pierson’s general point is well-taken, but his specific example of 1976/1978 as evidence of an electoral politics/policy regime disconnect is, to me, quite unconvincing.

By: Witt

Witt — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:08:28 +0000

The area where I see this played out most explicitly these days is in educational funding. There is a small, loud constituency arguing that paying for schools based on local property taxes is unfair to many students, not to mention that society as a whole loses out. And there is a large, grumblingly resentful constituency that thinks this is all just a big trick to take money away from white suburbs and give it to black cities. And then there are the rest of us, who mostly try to ignore the debate entirely.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:58:15 +0000

Some of the old-style racists would defend themselves by saying that they didn’t like white trash either. It seemed to be associated with a voluntary affiliate with the aristocratic planter mentality, and also with the practice of playing poor whites off against poor blacks (both of which are now Democrats.)

It was a two-level prejudice from their perspective, whereas poor whites would have a different pattern, resenting poor blacks for one group of reasons and resenting the better off for a different group or reasons. At the gut personal level, where the rubber meets the road, it’s a politics of resentment either way. And it’s certainly spread from the South.

I’ve met old New England Republicans who felt about the same way, who reflexively assumed that anyone who had ever received public assistance of any kind was a worthless cheater. All in all, a fairly widespread attitude in pre-New Deal America.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:23:28 +0000

Is there an mp3 of this session?

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:12:27 +0000

“Or, perhaps, not.”

Of course they are, and they also are aware it’s not just southerners and “[giving] to black people.” We got Californians too. Odd though how the Greenwich Conn seems to escape so much. Even nowadays.

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:37:28 +0000

Maybe it’s all “Nixon goes to China”. Nixon can afford to betray the hawks, and Carter can afford to betray the progressives, Reagan can afford to run debt through the roof and make peace with Gorbachev, Clinton can afford to dramatically push free trade and globalization, and end welfare as we know it, etc Lil Dubya may be the first President is long time who actually danced with those that brrung him. This fits the model of a partisan elite that sees elections are ways of neutralizing various constituencies – chiefly the victorious ones.

By: Ben Alpers

Ben Alpers — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:30:38 +0000

The latest McCain ad plays off the link that Eric Rauchway makes above. (h/t TPM)