Posted on 01/17/2010 5:56:37 PM PST by nwrep
The Brown-Coakley Senate race has echoes of another time, another era when a Mass. Senate race generated extraordinary enthusiasm and created a seismic shift in voter attitudes that came to define a lasting political realignment.
In 1952, a young Irish Catholic Democratic Congressman named John F. Kennedy took on sitting Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who had previously defeated three similar Irish Catholic candidates. Lodge, of course, was from one of the "first families" of Massachusetts, and with his WASP pedigree and Republican heritage, typified New England political structure of the time.
However, solidifying the trends of the previous decades, New England in general, but Mass. in particular was turning Democrat, and the young JFK was eager to tap into and exploit this trend.
Lodge took this challenge in stride, but from the New York Times reports of the time, did not campaign hard, instead spending most of his time promoting the Presidential candidacy of General Dwight Eisenhower, and angling for the VP slot on the ticket.
According to the New York Times article from November 2, 1952:
Mr. Lodge was busy all spring furthering the General's candidacy, and Mr. Kennedy was busy attending tea parties around Massachusetts in the interest of making himself better known. This is Mr. Lodge's fourth Senate campaign; he has defeated his previous challengers by substantial margins.
I think I posted the wrong photo. That was “Coffee with the Kennedys”.
THIS one is from a tea party:
http://media2.myfoxboston.com/html/galleries/09/ted-kennedy-family/1/lg/PC503.htm
Loyalty was a big thing to the WWII generation. My dad was a democrat, a mason, a Methodist, an Air Force guy and a Chevy guy.
Many of them are waking up to the fact that the Democrats are now the party of welfare, marxism and radical environmentalism. I'm praying this plays out with a Brown win. Pelosi is in a safe district, so she'll push as hard to the left as possible, but Dems from just about everywhere else will freak out, and Zero will, too. One year in is very early to become a lame duck, but here's hoping it will happen.
I wonder if any of the 18-30 Obama voters have figured out that the way he's planning to pay for health care is to cut services and require younger people who don't use health care to buy it.
The divided government was really a joke (if you consider a GOP Governor/Dem legislature). A Republican Governor is powerless because there’s no Republican opposition in the legislature. It’s 90% Democrat, and what handful of masochists on the Republican side are virtually all liberal RINOs who take the crumbs offered not to misbehave or challenge Dem supremacy, so essentially, it’s a wink and a nod to total Democrat control.
I’ve stated that I expect the state to have at least one body (the Senate) potentially become 100% Democrat in actuality within the decade. If Brown is elected, a Special election will be required to fill his seat. If the “Republicans” hold it, that might delay it, but if it falls to the Dems, my prediction will probably come true. The only legislative bodies with fewer Republicans in their state Senate is in Rhode Island and Hawaii.
What’s better is the election of Independent Tim Cahill in November over Patrick and the liberal RINO Charlie Baker, another Slick Willard clone of thorough and total uselessness. Baker has already chosen a gay liberal as his running mate, so his candidacy is little better than a mocking joke. Cahill promises more to run the state in a non-partisan fashion with an eye towards fiscal Conservatism, which at the current time, pending a complete resuscitation of the State GOP (which won’t occur as long as the current leftist buffoons run it, especially under Jennifer Nassour), is about the best alternative at the moment. The state hasn’t had a competent Chief Exec since Ed King, the last authentic center-right Governor.
Does sound like you all are fracked. Oh. the joys of a one-party state. reminding me of a story that went around Austin back in 1960. Lyndon Johnson sent one of his flunkies to Boston to “co-ordinate” with the Kennedy people and came bad and said, so the story went, “They are more crooked than we are,” and shook his head in amazement. He got almost nothing that he went asking for. Lyndon was fit to be tied.
Oh, goodness, no. I don’t live there, I’m not that much of a masochist. I’ve just studied the state as a perfect example of what happens when liberals are allowed free reign to take over a state Republican party and drive out the center-right (hint: it dies). MA was once one of the premier GOP states in America. It was pretty much a solid GOP state clear up until the late ‘50s.
Speaking of TX, this Brown-Coakley contest is quite similar to the Tower-Blakley 1961 special for LBJ’s Senate seat. You might recall, just like in MA today, there was no real Republican party in TX at that time (just the one Congressman from Dallas, Bruce Alger, who turns 92 this year, with zero Republicans in the Senate and only 2 lonely members from Amarillo & Galveston County in the TX House). Tower’s win over Dollar Bill Blakley, the interim appointee, was a shocking upset. Of course, the difference was that Tower was probably slightly more liberal (or at least Libertarian) than the Tory Democrat Blakley (and Blakley was an Ike supporter, anyway). It was merely the breakthrough of the Republicans that was the huge surprise.
The liberal Democrats I knew—the Texas Observer types such as Ronnie Dugger, seemed to prefer Tower because they hated the Tory Democrats, who were of course, pro-business. Back in 1956 I met the GOP senatorial candidate—Thad Hutcheson was his name, I am not sure. He was reallya nice man, a Houston businesman, I think. He was just doing it because someone had to. One thing I remember us Young Republicans: that he had met Richard Nixon, and his wife had commented at the time, that Sh thought until she met Nixon that he (Hutcheson) was the most social awkward politicians she had ever known. No gift at all for small talk. Pat, she liked.
Answer: Henry Cabbage Lard.
Heh, you’re an old school Texas Republican ! Yeah, you were talking about the 1957 special when Price Daniel stepped down to become Governor (and, of course, Dollar Bill Blakley was also appointed to that interim term, the only man to have served in both seats — but in ‘57, he agreed not to run in the special election).
I was looking it up to refresh my memory, it was really a three-man race between Republican Thad Hutcheson, Tory Dem Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. and liberal Ralph Yarborough. Unfortunately, as you’ll remember, because the libs were largely able to get behind Yarborough, the rest of the Conservative opposition was badly divided, and he won by a 38% plurality to Dies’s 30% and Hutcheson’s 23%. That ‘57 to ‘61 period was the last time TX had two liberal Democrat Senators (Ralph & LBJ).
Re: Nixon, it may have been that he was uncomfortable making small talk with women. I heard he supposedly would chew your ear off about sports if you were a guy. It’s too bad he had the 1960 race stolen from him, I think this country would’ve been drastically different today (for the better) had it not been.
In usual wimp Republican fashion, he took the cheating at the expense of his supporters( not for the first time ).
The guy was a sick demented weirdo. Like LBJ. But not a drug/sex addict like JFK.
I was just intentionally playing dumb while applying the offensive “teabagger” term in the same way the dems of today are applying it to our “tea party” folks.
I’ve read that in that in that race Tower courted black votes and was successful in doing that.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938099,00.html
What did Harding do to the Navy?
During the War we began a building program that would have made our Navy the largest in the World, one exceeding even the Royal Navy. At the Washington Conference we agreed to limit the size of our battleship fleet in line with the British and other national navies. Our navy had in fact played a limited role in the war, but we had greatly gained in experience, and with the big ships under construction, we would soon have outmatched the Royal Navy in every category. Ironically, we probably would not have developed the aircraft carrier the way we did if the Battleship admirals had got the ships they wanted. Then neither would the Japs who had to swallow a much smaller tonnage allowance. Without the limitations of the Washington conference,WWII would have been fought differently. And there would have been no Pearl Harbor.
Nixon was a strange guy. I have read that the brother who died had a very different personality and that Nixon was really shaken up by his death. Really loved the guy. So he always wanted to be one of the guys. When he served in the South Pacific,as a supply officer , he was liked by his men, so much so that one of the guys who served with him said that when he saw “Mr. Roberts “ he was reminded of “Nick.” Great card player, and earned a lot of money that way. Had that in common with IKE who during his whole career from West Point on supplemented his pay by playing cards. Learned it from the guy who took him hunting back in Abilene, who also taught him to shoot. Not as good as Patton—an Olympian qualified shooter, but Ike was a crack shot. Tells me something about both men. No one doubts that a good poker player is someone of high intelligence.
Yeah, Nixon had 4 brothers. Two of them died young and it devastated the family. I know Oliver Stone tried to speculate on the psychological damage it caused Nixon. I think more damage was inflicted on him by the media. Here was a self-made man, came from virtually nothing, had seen real tragedy, and he became the lifelong enemy of the media and the left beginning in 1946 when he knocked off their boy, Jerry Voorhis, a Socialist Democrat Congressman. He did again with exposing another golden boy of the left, Alger Hiss, as a Communist. He did it again in ‘50 when he beat another Socialist paragon in Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Barbara Boxer of her day. This guy HAD to be destroyed by the media, and the relentlessness for which they have attacked him, even after his death, for 64 straight years, has been nothing short of insane. It’s remarkable he was able to function as well as he did under their constant attacks.
If the Kennedy family (or LBJ) had ever been pilloried and personally attacked at the level of Nixon, those guys would’ve folded like a cheap suit long before they ever reached the Presidency. Although I never agreed with all of Nixon’s positions (the irony is that Nixon was more a moderate, even liberal, Republican - his positions on economics while in the White House were simply awful), I’ve always had sympathy for him in the unhinged, personal way the media went after him that went beyond the pale of fairness and into the realm of “get the bastard at all costs.”
I see the way Gov. Sarah Palin gets attacked today as EXACTLY the same with which Nixon was, viciously personal and outright deranged. Nixon also was able to perfect the strategy of going around the elites, bypassing the Marxist media thugs, to take his message to the people and to win office, especially his 1972 landslide. Yet another reason why they loathed him so. He wouldn’t kiss their ring, and neither will Palin.
Agree with everything you say. They ravaged him; they ravaged his wife. The difference between him and Palin is that she seems to be psychologically tougher. Take her at her word that she keeps falling back on her family for support. As I see it, she is ambitious and what is more thinks she measures up to the other guys. How good she is, remains to be seen.
I read that they even hated Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. The libs dumped on it relentlessly as being sappy and corny, from what I remember, and I think it contributed to him being uneasy on television debating Kennedy.
I think Nixon may have been more psychologically prepared to take the Presidency in 1960. In ‘60, we were still like the ‘50s in many ways, still stable and unified. After JFK & LBJ, this country was a disaster by 1968, divided, radicalized, total basketcase. I think Nixon’s Presidency from a 1961-1969 period would’ve kept the country more unified, he’d have made a more moderate approach to Civil Rights issues that wouldn’t have led to radicalization (and more to the point, not leading Blacks over 90% into the Dem party), I think he would’ve gone balls-to-the-walls with respect to freeing Cuba and not dicked around on Vietnam and achieved a victory far earlier. He’d not have given a damn about appeasing closeted Marxist idiots like Walter Cronkite and other fellow traveller media types, just charging ahead and doing what he thought was right. As I said earlier, I think we would’ve been a far different country today.
Well, simply put, they hated anything he did. He could do no right with the elites. They especially hated the speech because it was EFFECTIVE. Absent that speech, he might have been dumped from the ticket and remained a Senator from California.
As for the infamous tv debate, as radio listeners well remember, Nixon won it in substance, but the medium of tv made JFK look like the winner. If IIRC, Nixon was getting over illness, his clothing looked a bit disheveled, and overall he looked poorly and refused to be given a proper makeup touchup, while JFK apparently had not only gotten a touch-up, he allegedly had just come off a quickie with some bimbo, so he was QUITE relaxed. If only the public had known THAT.
Didn't menton that JFK had sex with about 30,000 of them.
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