Sauce for the Gander

NRO ^ | 12/11/2002 | David Frum

[Utah Girl]

I do wish the liberals and Democrats who (fairly) criticize Trent Lott could make their case without indulging in self-pitying fantasy. Here for instance is Joe Klein on “Meet the Press” on Sunday:

“I think that if a Democrat had made an analogous statement, like if Henry Wallace had been elected in 1948, we would have had a much easier road with the Soviet Union because we would have just given them everything and there wouldn't have been a Cold War. You would have been jumping up and down. And I think that this kind of statement in this country at this time is outrageous, and it should be called that.”

A footnote for our younger readers. Henry Wallace was a brilliant agricultural businessman, a Republican by background, who joined the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. FDR choose Wallace as his running mate in 1940. Shrewd though he was in the marketplace, Wallace was hopelessly gullible about politics. He became one of Stalin’s leading defenders and apologists in an administration already dangerously prone to illusions about the Soviets. Democratic conservatives forced Wallace off the ticket in 1944. Wallace served briefly in Harry Truman’s administration. He became more and more disgusted with Truman’s Cold War policies and in 1948 he quit the Democrats and ran for president on a platform of ultra-liberalism at home and appeasement of the Soviets abroad. His campaign was infiltrated by members of the still-lively U.S. Communist Party, and by November he had evolved into a pure mouthpiece for Soviet expansionism.

Now Klein is right that it would be just as appalling for a contemporary Democrat to say he wished that Wallace had won in 1948 as it was when Lott said the same about that other renegade Democrat of 1948, Strom Thurmond.

But Klein is dead wrong when he pretends that a Democrat who said such a thing would be called to account for it. There was a prominent national Democrat who not only praised Henry Wallace, but who actively supported his 1948 campaign. And what happened to that Democrat? Was he repudiated by his own party, as Lott is being repudiated? No – he was nominated for president in 1972. Even today, George McGovern does not repent of his efforts on behalf of a communist-dominated presidential campaign, as he reminded us all in this 1999 speech:

“1948 was the first presidential election year in which my wife Eleanor and I were able to vote. That was the year Henry Wallace ran for President on the Progressive ticket. Eleanor and I supported Mr. Wallace and we served as delegates to his convention in Philadelphia. Wallace believed that the Cold War and the global arms race between Russians and Americans were over done. He believed that fundamental economic and political problems could not be resolved by military means.

“Twenty four years later I won the Democratic presidential nomination on a similar platform: ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam and bringing the Cold War and the arms race under control.

“A remarkable band of volunteers engineered that capture of the Democratic Presidential nomination. One of them was Eleanor McGovern who is here today. Will she stand. Another was the Texas Coordinator of the McGovern campaign, a young Yale law school graduate, Bill Clinton.”

When that young Yale McGovernite became president in his turn, he attempted to appoint America’s most visible apologist for Castroite communism, Johnetta Cole of Spelman College, as his Secretary of Education. When Clinton was compelled to drop the nomination, Jesse Jackson – who today eagerly denounces Trent Lott for bigotry – was quoted blaming the Clinton administration for succumbing to “Jewish complaints.”

It is a fact that people with segregationist backgrounds found their way into the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s. It is also a fact that people with communist and fellow-traveling backgrounds made their way into the Democratic party at the same time. So here’s a deal: We Republicans will continue to demand that our leaders publicly denounce segregation and racial discrimination, if Democrats will begin to demand that their leaders publicly repudiate fellow-traveling and appeasement.

Nor will Democrats who want to banish their party's old ghosts have to reach so far back into the past as 1948. They can start with Jimmy Carter's appalling Nobel Prize speech.

As James Taranto noted in Opinion Journal yesterday, Carter not only criticized his president's policies on foreign soil in the middle of a war - but he also made a point of blasting an embattled foreign ally at the same time.

"A Poor Choice of Words--III
"In Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, Jimmy Carter seemed to blame Israel for all the Middle East's problems. 'One of the key factors that . . . arouses intense feelings of animosity in the world is the festering problem in the Holy Land, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the inability of Israel to live in peace with its neighbors,' Reuters quotes him as saying.

"Now, this could have been an actual poor choice of words. After all, strictly speaking it's true that Israel is unable to live in peace with most of its neighbors--but only because those neighbors refuse to make peace with Israel. In his acceptance speech, however, Carter seemed to take another dig at the Jewish state: 'Today there are at least eight nuclear powers on earth, and three of them are threatening to their neighbours in areas of great international tension.'

"It seems likely that India and Pakistan are two of the countries that 'are threatening to their neighbors.' Here's a list of the remaining six nuclear powers: America, Russia, China, Britain, France and Israel. Guess which one of them Carter had in mind?"

Here's hoping Carter meant China - but maybe Joe Klein and others ought to insist that he explain himself. Otherwise, to persist with Klein's own 1940s-vintage analogies, it is rather as if Herbert Hoover had traveled to Sweden in 1942 to condemn Roosevelt's war policies and blast Britain for its failure to get along better with Nazi Germany. Isn't it?