Posted on 06/01/2003 5:09:29 PM PDT by William McKinley
KARL ROVE, President Bush's resident political genius, has long had a fascination with another Republican president, William McKinley.
In his first election in 1896, McKinley defeated the legendary populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan and created a new Republican majority built on the rising industrial elite. Republicans won six of the next eight presidential elections. Rove likes the implications for Bush.
That was all very interesting before Sept. 11. But Rove's McKinley metaphor has only become more relevant since. It can help us understand how new foreign policy challenges necessarily alter domestic politics.
To go back to McKinley: Between his election in 1896 and his reelection in 1900, the Spanish-American War intervened, producing an easy American triumph that left the United States in possession of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.
''As years go, the period from 1898 to 1900 was a short time,'' wrote the historian George Mowry, ''but in the nation's world circumstance, it represented the difference between relatively carefree adolescence and the beginnings of the burdens of maturity.''
But many Americans, including Bryan, opposed an imperial role for their nation and hated the idea of Washington governing millions of people in the Philippines from afar. Nominated again in 1900, Bryan ran on an anti-imperialist platform.
If you think Democrats are defensive these days, consider this from an August 1900 Bryan speech: ''Although the Democrats realized that the administration would necessarily gain a political advantage from the conduct of a war in which the very nature of the case must soon end in a complete victory, they vied with the Republicans in the support which they gave the president.'' Sound familiar?
Bryan, of course, argued that Democrats could support the president during the war while opposing his subsequent policies. That may come to sound familiar, too.
From Rove's point of view, it has to be heartening that McKinley beat Bryan by an even larger margin in the 1900 election than in 1896.
But, as Rove would acknowledge, no metaphor is perfect. The obvious difference between then and now is brought home by Secretary of State John Hay's famous description of the Spanish-American conflict as ''a splendid little war.''
Everything the Bush administration says about war on terrorism points not to one or two splendid victories but to a long struggle, as Nicholas Lemann ably documented in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Bush offers an unapologetically expansive view of America's responsibility to rearrange the world by bringing down governments that support terror.
The war on terror has often been analogized to the Cold War. But the new war, in fact, represents an even larger assertion of American power - a quantum leap in American engagement more akin to the one that occurred on McKinley's watch.
The Cold War, after all, had a very specific goal: to contain and, if possible, roll back the power of the Soviet Union. In the new struggle, the United States will find itself juggling many objectives (and enemies) at once.
Communism was an evil system built around a flawed idea. Terrorism is evil, too - the president is right to use the word - but it is a method, not an idea. That means that ''antiterrorism'' will always be a less coherent concept than ''anticommunism.''
This explains why the administration is tied up in knots over how to respond to Palestinian terror against Israel. The administration's commitment to opposing terror everywhere conflicts with its interest in getting the Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate. The president and his diplomats are wary of taking too hard a line against the Palestinians because their basic objective is to push the Israeli-Palestinian struggle off to the side. Then they can get on with the business of winning allies for a war against Iraq.
But this begs the question: If what's happening in Israel isn't ''terrorism,'' what is? Yet if our goal, correctly, is a two-state solution, how can the United States square its refusal to negotiate with terrorists with its desire to push Israelis and Palestinians toward that end?
Because the balancing act his policy entails is so difficult, Bush has set himself a much harder challenge than McKinley did. That doesn't mean Bush's domestic political position is weaker. On the contrary, Democrats are even more tentative these days than William Jennings Bryan was.
But Bush is going much further than McKinley ever did. He wants to reorder the world. Our political system is only beginning to absorb the implications of his ambition.
E.J. Dionneis a syndicated columnist.
This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 4/2/2002.
Karl Rove has a riff, which he gives to anybody who will listen, entitled “It’s 1896.” Every national political reporter has heard it, to the extent that it induces affectionate eye-rolling when it comes up. “It’s 1896” is based on Rove’s reading of the work of a small school of conservative revisionist historians of the Gilded Age (that is, historians who love the Gilded Age), one of whom, Lewis Gould, taught a graduate course that Rove took at the University of Texas.Here’s the theory, delivered at Rove’s mile-a-minute clip: “Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna”--the man elected President in 1896 and his political Svengali--”is wrong. The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.”
Interested, I went to the library and read up on McKinley. There are a couple of big differences between this campaign and the one in 1896: it was a recession campaign run on economic issues, and McKinley’s main proposal, high protectionist tariffs, runs opposite to Bush’s position on the same issue. But the similarities are indeed striking--so striking as to make you wonder whether Rove deliberately followed the Hanna-McKinley playbook as he coached George W. Bush through his astonishingly rapid transformation from aimless Presidential son to putative President.
McKinley was a man with an “amiable disposition” and a “winning demeanor,” great at political handshaking events, who was elected and then reelected governor of the most important state between the coasts, Ohio. He was unusually popular, for a Republican, with urban workers and ethnic minorities. When he ran into financial trouble, his rich friends took up a collection and bailed him out. He even proposed a big reduction in Ohio property taxes.
Mark Hanna, who devoted himself full time to making McKinley President, engineered a “front-porch campaign,” involving a staged procession of prominent visitors to McKinley’s home in Canton, which worked so well that McKinley was able to lock up the Republican nomination early. Then Hanna systematically raised much more money than any previous Presidential campaign ever had, and used it to fund an unprecedentedly heavy media campaign (in the form of widely distributed pamphlets) and a massive organizational effort in the states. And, in winning, McKinley ushered in a period in which the Republicans, as the Party representing business prosperity in the new industrial age, controlled the White House right up to the Great Depression, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s two terms. Source
''As years go, the period from 1898 to 1900 was a short time,'' wrote the historian George Mowry, ''but in the nation's world circumstance, it represented the difference between relatively carefree adolescence and the beginnings of the burdens of maturity.''
Which TR was responsible for. For my money, Theodore Roosevelt was the greatest president of all time....
Is this a quote from Karl Rove? He is streching with the "rising new economy" remark.If there is a pheonix emerging from the ashes I would like to know what part of the ash heap it is rising from.
A return to 'enduring things'.
A permanent OUTSOURCING of pinko, liberal, halflife only as long as Bill Gates decides types of 'New Economy' programming boondogles.
A return to "things investing", appreciating assets as opposed to the ephemeral..."NEVER MADE A PENNY except by flipping" investing.
Durable goods...30-30 or .35 Remington Deer rifles that you buy ONCE, and pass down as Heirlooms, as opposed to a flashy COMPUTER that is obsolete even before being manufactured in Red China or Bangaladesh!
A return of Heavy Industry as the $$$$ death spirals against the EURO, the Gold Dinar, etc, etc.
Americans seeing America again as Socialist Utopias again become too expensive for serious vacations.
Just for OPENERS!!!
I'm not sure that he does, though some of his advisors may. If Bush doesn't get into another major war, he will probably look a lot like McKinley. So much for E.J.'s punditry.
I believe its a reference to the US becoming more of a service oriented economy and also becoming more investment oriented by more and more middle class people.
Because the balancing act his policy entails is so difficult, Bush has set himself a much harder challenge than McKinley did. That doesn't mean Bush's domestic political position is weaker.When E.J. Dionne gets uppity and demanding consistency, beware. As usual, it's 180 proof, knee-deep, fly-infested muck.
First off, like Bush, President McKinley knew 'xactly what was going on with the war. After Dewey took the Philippines, McKinley said,
And so it has come to pass that in a few short months we have become a world power...He never asked for the war, he went into it with a tear in his eye and despite the clamor for it from within his Administration -- and he prosecuted it fully. Bringing it to its ultimate conclusion meant taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico, on top of liberating Cuba. Doing it, McKinley applied as much "strategic ambiguity" as any American president, Bush included.
That war was the single-most important exercise of the Monroe Doctrine, and it settled the question of the Americas once and for all. (Recall that Napoleon II's Mexican empire came merely a generation before -- during McKinley's generation). That said, it launched a century of other problems, just as any other war or crisis has done. The net product is a good one, and we ought to applaud it. McKinley didn't want to be in the Philippines. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating in the face of Dionne's idiocy: when McKinley asked Wm. H. Taft to join the Philippines Commission, Taft declined on account of his opposition to the occupation. McKinley replied that he didn't like it any better, but that's precisely why he wanted Taft for the job.
After that statement, Taft had no choice but to take it. It was emblematic of McKinley's style. He was a master at the quiet game, something Bush has been playing magnificently. Where Roosevelt went at the 20th century banging pots, McKinley was heading into it with, truly, soft words and a big-ass stick. McKinley would have handled it far better than Roosevelt, who caused more agitation than he resolved.
Rove is damned-straight to invoke McKinley, a president I rate in the top five. Maybe Bush II will push William into the sixth position...
Thanks for the ping, x.
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