Don’t you believe it!

So Mark Warner is insisting to anyone who will listen that he will not be Barack Obama’s running mate.  I’ve read the words (Bearing Drift) just like everyone else.  I just don’t believe them.

I have two reasons.

Warner’s history with the truth: Mark Warner said he would cut spending as Governor.  State spending rose more than 30.8% during his four years (and General Fund spending rose more than 18.9%).  Mark Warner said he would not raise taxes; less than one year later he was demanding the people of Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia increase their own taxes, and in 2004 he proposed and imposed the largest tax increase in Virginia history.  Now he wants us to believe he would not accept the Vice Presidential nomination.  Sorry, no dice.

Even if Warner is telling the truth now, will he really turn Obama down?  I sincerely doubt it.  History tells us politicians who are more than willing to rule out a hypothetical Vice Presidential nomination react very differently when the real one comes along.  The best example of this was Harry Truman, who promised his constituents, his wife, his mother, the press, and just about everyone else who would listen that he did not want to be FDR’s running mate in 1944.  Truman even gave cogent argument against his own selection.

Then, with Truman in the room, Bob Hannegan, incoming Democratic Party Chairman, called FDR.  The conversation went like this (U.S. Senate):

FDR: Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?

Hannegan: No. He is the contrariest Missouri mule I’ve ever dealt with

FDR: Well, you tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.

(click)

The rest is history.

Now, does anyone really think that Mark Warner - after being told that he can play the pivotal role in electing America’s first African-American President, after being told how much the Democratic Party needs him with the country at war, after being reminded that he can, in fact, run for both VP and Senator at the same time - is actually going to look Barack Obama in the face and say no?

Me neither.

Besides, who will be pressuring him not to take the spot?  Tim Kaine?  He can appoint a caretaker in January of 2009 and run for the job himself in the November special election.  Deeds and Moran?  Ask yourself how Mark Warner could better help them - as a freshman Senator or Vice President of the United States?  Republicans?  He wouldn’t listen to them anyway, and besides, this just means we get to vote against Warner twice!

So even if Warner is telling the truth (and I won’t concede that he is), he’s only telling the truth now.  Should Obama actually ask him to take the VP slot (and right now, I can only see Bill Richardson as a more likely selection), Warner will do it.

On faith, politics, and American history

Rick Sincere and Jim Bowden are having one of those arguments that would demand any good Irish-descended contrarian (say, like me) try to cut in.  In this case, the two bloggers are discussing what role a candidate’s faith can and should play in politics (Jim’s arguments are in the comments on Rick’s post).  It’s already an argument approaching rarefied air, but I think it’s missing an important perspective - mine (yeah, I know, I would say that).

Having grown up in the Northeast (the history of which is far richer than most people realize), I can attest to the very unique way America handles this subject.  In most of the world, religion has been fighting a long and losing battle against the Enlightenment of the 18th Century.  Even in areas where the Enlightenment didn’t quite take hold, the conflict continues to rage.

In this country, by contrast, faith (particularly Christian faith) responded to the Enlightenment and adapted itself to a nation infused with it.  The best evidence that faith is best served by a republican form of government is this American historical anomaly (known as the Second Great Awakening).  The first government in the history of the world that refused to give people meaning to their lives forced them to find it elsewhere.

Furthermore (and this is where Rick and I part company), given that faith had come to terms with the American system here, it naturally had a right (and, in fact, a duty) to be politically active.  It was the faithful men of the northeast (and their cousins in the Ohio Western Reserve) that preserved, protected, and promulgated abolitionism as a political ideal in antebellum America.  These men of were also practically alone in extending that to demand what we now call civil rights for African-Americans and equal rights for women.

That said, this dramatic and unique shift in faith’s view of itself and its role did not happen until after Jefferson had died and Lincoln had reached maturity.  Thus neither biography can do it justice (although I do know Jefferson called himself Christian during one of this campaigns for the Presidency - I believe it was in 1796).  Better to look at those who - even as adults - witnessed its beginnings first-hand in the Northeast (William Henry Seward, Thurlow Weed, Salmon Chase, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, the Beecher family, etc.).  I do not think I need to go into much detail on the role of faith in the modern civil-rights movement.

As for the present day, while faith is hardly the disqualifier that Rick fears (or Cal Thomas apparently hopes) it is, I do think it can have some relevance.  Lest anyone forget, the “religious right” began as a force in America to resist government encroachment.  Prior to the 1970s, every  religious involvement in politics favored government’s expansion (which is likely the real reason Rick worries about it).  Even the Roman Catholic Church’s deep 19th Century political activism was in favor of royalism and against “red republicanism.”  The predominance of Catholics in the more anti-government Democratic Party was far more the result of American ethnic politics than anything else (in fact, this is best shown by the second Catholic immigration wave - the Italians in the early 20th century, whose rivarly with the Irish in the northeast made them the most prominent Republican voting block in New York and Boston) .

The conscious decision of social conservatives to join the limited government coalition in the pre-Reagan era was unprecedented in American history, and there is no similar political event anywhere else in the world.  So we have to ask ourselves why.

The reason is this: not only was the American culture moving in a direction social conservatives found intolerable, but it was largely government policy that was causing it.  The definition of human life, previously determined by the people through their legislatures, had been usurped by the judiciary in 1973.  Twelve years prior, “separation of church and state” - a phrase coined by non-Framer Thomas Jefferson and a campaign theme by Jacksonians hotly disputed by the Whig opposition - was suddenly written into the Constitution without a single legislator even voting on it.  It was these government-authored disruptions that led the “religious right” to be formed.  Over the past generation, some have been considered immobile, others actually reversed (the crowding out of faith in the public square, for example, was stopped cold by the Rehnquist Court, which may be its most important legacy); this is leading some people of faith to return to the communitarian impulses of old (thus the numerous anecdotes - behind which admittedly there is not data - of evangelicals moving away from the limited government coalition).

As for the role faith plays in politics today (and the importance we should give to the faith of candidates), it depends on the politician.  If a candidate cites faith as a primary role in his political thinking (as Obama has), then it must be scrutinized, whereas a candidate who relies less on his faith in politics (say, McCain) is held to a different standard.  I would also submit that Thomas’ larger point was to question Obama’s credibility and his alarming tendency to twist words to mean anything he likes them to mean - he (Thomas) just happened to find that this extended to Obama’s choice of faith.

In short, we tend to remember Christianity’s role in Prohibition, “blue laws,” and prayer in schools far more than its role in ending slavery, bringing equality to the African-Americans, and the continuing battle to protect the most defenseless among us (pre-born children).  Those who fear repeats of the former should remind themselves of the latter and temper their criticisms; likewise, those who focus on the latter need to consider the former in offering their defenses.  Finally, both sides must remember that it is America’s uniqueness that makes this argument even possible.

On America, Canada, and Freedom

As Canada grapples with a full-frontal assault on freedom of speech, one of the blogs with the most spirited discussion happens to be one on which I have posting privileges: the Western Standard’s Shotgun blog.  Fellow poster P.M. Jaworksi commented on the nature of American exceptionalism, which led me to post a response that I thought would also interest the readers down here.  Here is that response.

I would humbly submit that American Exceptionalism is a bit more than a myth, and none other than the fellow whose book started this discussion agrees (New York Times):

“What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins,” Mr. Steyn added. “Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”

However, I think what has really made America different is not what PM Jaworski successfully debunked.  Rather, I think it is the American resistance to tradition for its own sake.  In much of the rest of the Anglosphere, the freedoms that sprang from Britain were considered so organic by the 18th century that no one felt the need to dramatically write them down.  Thus Britain has a constitution that is very real to most Britons, but non-existent to us.

Why? Because we’re sticklers for having things written down on paper.  In the absence of the tradition of the Crown and all that flowed from it, we had to start from scratch.  Even so, there was some discussion when our Constitution was being debated in the halls of state legislatures that there would be no need to specifically limit government powers; in fact, without the stubbornness of George Mason, Patrick Henry, and other Virginians, the first ten amendments to the Constitution (known as the Bill of Rights down here) might never have come to fruition. What would have happened without these ten amendments (including the First)?  Well, we can see what would have happened from the tragic events in Canada.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is painfully simple: if you wish to limit government’s power, make the limitations a condition of the government’s founding.  Of course, we have plenty of instances where even that is insufficient (see the Constitution-is-a-living-document nonsense), but at least it gives freedom a fighting chance.

Dull?!?! That’s not the 1970s I remember

In his review of Swingtown (which I will not see tonight - I’m watching Game 4 of the Finals), Rick Sincere referred to the 1970s as “dull.”  Here’s his elaboration of that point:

Another challenge the producers face is that, despite the economic dislocation caused by a sudden spike in oil prices, the distrust of government caused by Watergate, and a general sense of malaise, the 1970s were — in contrast with, say the 1960s — dull.

Yanek Mieczkowski writes in his book, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s:

With the nation’s cities and campuses at peace, the political turmoil of the past decade was easy to forget. In an essay simply entitled “Sigh!” columnist Russell Baker wrote, “The nineteen-seventies are boring. The decade is already half over and its chief legacy is an engulfing swamp of boredom.” Baker noted that “President Ford is boring, which is his chief political strength.” But Baker added, “In the nineteen-sixties, of course, Americans hungered for boredom. A sleepy Government, some peace in the streets…. In all that turbulence, it seemed an unattainable dream of paradise. Now we may have it, and may even be enjoying it.”

That is the climate from which Swingtown emerges. Its first episode is set during the weekend of July 2-4, 1976, and has all of the hallmarks of reaction to ennui: beer and bratwurst, Penthouseand pot, unabashed cocaine use, skinnydipping in Lake Michigan, and wife swapping.

Now, Rick grew up in the 1970s, my formative years began a decade later.  I do however have some memory of the 1970s - particularly the part of the decade after Ford left office.  I would humbly submit that the latter half of the seventies actually defined the decade, and it was anything but “dull.”

I remember gas lines in 1978 that ran for miles through residential neighborhoods (this was the pre-subdivision era, when all the side streets led to major streets).  I remember the hostages in Iran in 1979.  I remember TV news reports (yes, from what we now call MSM) about how the Soviets now had a larger arsenal of nuclear weapons than we did (keep in mind, this was when our wonderful intelligence agencies were insisting the rusty Soviet military-industrial complex was state-of-the-art).  I remember the Afghanistan invasion and the Olympic Boycott (I know, I know, that was 1980, but close enough).

That’s just what I was old enough to remember.  That doesn’t take into account New York City’s brush with bankruptcy in 1975, the horrific riot from the blackout of 1977, and the dramatic rise in urban crime that made public safety a genuine political issue for the first time in American history.

Now, it may not just be timing; geography may also have a role.  Both Rick and Swingtown are remembering the Midwest; Rick in particular is looking back to his childhood in a Milwaukee suburb.  Perhaps the 70s were a plodding decade out there.  I just know that 15 miles west of New York City, they were anything but.

So while Swingtown works for Rick’s 1970s (and I don’t mean to disparage Rick, who is a friend, or the show itself, which I have not seen and likely won’t so long as there’s the NBA and MLB competing with it), for anyone interested in the 1970s that I remember, try The Bronx is Burning.

American Politics since 1988: Part I (1988-1993)

This is part one of what (I hope) will be a four-part series on the last twenty years in American and Virginian politics (the overview is here).  I begin with the 1988 presidential campaign.

These days, about the only thing most political aficionados remember from the ‘88 campaign is Willie Horton and Mike Dukakis’ ridiculous photo-op in a tank.  However, what really separated the two candidates was George H. W. Bush’s insistence that he would not raise taxes.  Despite withering criticism from Dukakis, the media (what we called MSM at the time), the entire Democratic establishment, and even many Republicans, Bush refused to waiver.  As a result he won a higher percentage of the popular vote and more electoral votes than any presidential candidate since (53% and 426, respectively).

In light of the fifty-fifty elections we have since in the last decade, Bush the Elder’s majority look massive (take the states his son carried in 2004, take away Iowa and West Virginia, then add California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland - yes, Maryland - and all of New England save Massachusetts and Rhode Island - and yes, Bush the Elder carried Vermont).  At the time, however, it was actually a fall-off from Ronald Reagan’s 49-state romp in 1984.  Social conservatives in particular were suspicious of Bush (who had been pro-abortion as late as 1980).  Economic conservatives, by contrast, were pleased not just with his no-new-taxes pledge, but also his admittedly weird call for volunteerism (”a thousand points of light”), which seemed to make it clear he was not interested in expanding government.  At least, that was the perception in 1988.

One year later, that perception still held, but the GOP was not taking advantage.  The high profile 1989 races all went badly for the Republicans, in part because economic conservatism (still perceived at the time as an adamant refusal to raise taxes) was not an issue in any of them.  In New Jersey (which I still called home at the time), both candidates promised not to raise taxes, and in fact, the Democrat (Jim Florio) tried to attack his Republican opponent as a spendthrift politician.  In Virginia, again, both candidates insisted taxes would not be raised (economic issues were a non-starter in the race for New York City Mayor).

Instead, what defined the races appeared to be social issues.  Both Democrats - Florio in New Jersey and Doug Wilder in Virginia - ran on unabashedly pro-abortion positions.  Since they both won, those stands were credited for their victories.  However, this did not take into account the reaction of their Republican opponents.  In New Jersey, Jim Courter slowly and painfully abandoned his previous pro-life record, and his support slid down witheach passing week.  In Virginia, by contrast, Marshall Coleman eventually settled on a firm pro-life position, and nearly beat Wilder.  What enabled Wilder to hang on was his willingness to stand toe-to-toe with Coleman on economic issues, which enabled limited-government voters not tied to the GOP (independents and Libertarians) to vote on social issues.  Those who were socially liberal went for Wilder, and delivered the Governor’s Mansion to him.

It would take a couple of years to see the effect of this dichotomy, and it was interrupted by President Bush breaking his word on tax hikes on 1990.  The result for his party was catastrophic.  By June of 1990, a majority of Americans believed Bush would keep his word on taxes, and not coincidentally, the GOP was approaching parity in national party ID withthe Democrats for the first time in almost 60 years.  When Bush, buckled under to support a tax increase less than a month later, the writing was on the wall, and the GOP was sunk in mid-term congressional elections that year (prior to the Bush reversal, conventional wisdom held that the Republican might just buck the trend of the party in power losing Congressional seats in the 1990 mid-terms; afterwards, GOP losses were assured, and did indeed happen).

Yet economic conservatism did manage to show its strength in, of all places, Massachusetts.  In a state furious with the local Democratic machine; primary voters dumped the establishment candidate in favor of Boston University Professor John Silber, a near-perfect image of a “Reagan Democrat” - conservative on social issues, liberal on economic ones.  His Republican opponent, William Weld, actually tried running to Silber’s left on most issues, while Silber eagerly ran to Weld’s right - except on one issue, a referendum calling for deep tax cuts in the state.  Silber opposed it; Weld supported it; it was the only issue where Weld was obviously more conservative than Silber.  The referendum failed, but Weld managed to rally the economic conservatives to his side and win the governorship in what was (and still is) arguably the most economically liberal state in the Union.  A similar shocker occurred in Michigan (although in that case the race was a more conventional left-right battle).

In Virginia and New Jersey, meanwhile, the two governors took different paths and it made all the difference.  Jim Florio rammed through the largest state tax increase in history (at the time), while Wilder resisted pressure from his own party to raise taxes (Democrats dominated the General Assembly then), and instead went with spending cuts.  Most Virginians remember the 1991 elections that followed as a smashing Republican success (the party gained eight seats in the Senate and two in the House of Delegates), and thus assume Wilder’s feuds with the Democrats were responsible.  However, that doesn’t take into account the rest of the country on Election Night 1991 - or to be more precise, it only takes into account an upset Democratic victory in a Pennsylvania special election for U.S. Senate that dominated the Washington narrative.  In New Jersey, for example, the Democrats took an ungodly beating; Republicans went from weak minorities to veto-proof majorities in both chambers.  As bad as the DPVA’s Senate losses were that year, the NJ Dems still lost more (eleven seats), while in the lower house the Dems in New Jersey lost nearly two dozen seats.

Thus economic conservatism, where it actually made it to the ballot, still did remarkably well, even as the Republicans seemed to abandon it at the national level while the Democrats either embraced or eschewed it (much more the latter).  The stage was set for a completely unpredictable 1992.

What the country got were there candidates who clung to big government in some form (the editors of National Review referred to the 1992 election as “a choice for more taxes, for more, more taxes, and for more, more, more taxes”).  Even so, 1992 had a few tea leaves that are easier to read today than they were back then.  For starters, despite a Democratic victory in both the Presidency and Congress, 55% of voters said they preferred smaller government to larger government in the Election Day exit poll.  Unfortunately, none of the candidates represented that silent majority, so they split based on social issues.  Thus, Bill Clinton, despite being a Southerner, became the first Democrat in almost thirty years to win New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and California.  In Virginia, meanwhile, Bush was held to a lower vote level (45%) than any Republican since Nixon in 1968.

Economic conservatives were thus adrift between the two parties, and ready to support whichever one would address their concerns.  The Democrats had an opportunity to reshape the political climate in America.  As we now know, they didn’t take it (at least at first).

Bill Clinton, like most at the time, assumed it was the weak economy per se and the defection of Republican votes to Ross Perot that got him elected.  He thus decided to go after Perot’s constituency by highlighted the latter’s signature issue - the budget deficit.  Like most Democrats, he took the tax-hike option.  What happened next helped reshape American politics for a decade.

Clinton likely expected he could get some Republican support for his budget plan.  He was wrong.  By the time his combination of immediate tax-hikes and conditional budget cuts made it to Congress, every Republican was opposed to it.  It was the most dramatic division on taxes and spending that Washington had ever seen (not even Reagan could unify the Republican Party the way Clinton unwittingly did).  For every economically conservative voter, the message was absolutely unmistakable- and it was amplified by the rise of talk radio (at the time, Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy).  The confusing signals of the Bush Administration were washed away.  Adding further emphasis was the fact that the Democrats could only muster enough support for one-vote margins in either house (Vice President Gore broke the Senate tie).

The effect could be felt in the elections later that year.  Republicans pulled a complete shocker by winning the mayor’s race in Jersey City, New Jersey (a Democratic bastion for nearly a century).  The entire Garden State was in the midst of a four-alarm tax revolt that managed to turn a weak GOP candidate (Christie Whitman) who ran what was arguably the worst campaign in years into the next Governor (she beat Jim Florio by a squeaker), while the GOP legislative majorities, while no longer veto-proof, were still commanding.

In Virginia, the Democrats could have avoided disaster.  Wilder’s refusal to raise taxes had angered many Democrats, but it had meant the local party was spared the outside wrath that did in Florio and other big government Democrats.  Unfortunately for them, their nominee (Attorney General Mary Sue Terry) did not feel she could run on Wilder’s internally divisive record.  Instead, she tried the other half of the libertarian formula - social issues - and ran an endless campaign against the social conservative Mike Farris.

It might have worked, but for two things: 1) Wilder was not happy with Terry’s refusal to embrace his successful fiscal record, and 2) Mike Farris was running for Lieutenant Governor.  Terry’s actual opponent (George Allen) thus had a clear field, and romped to victory.  Farris himself lost, but only because his Democratic opponent (Lt. Governor Don Beyer) was perceived as an economic conservative himself.  In the Virginia House of Delegates races, Republicans actually won 51% of the votes, but Democratic redistricting kept them in the minority with 47 seats.

So, as election night 1993 faded into history, economic conservatives were once again drifting to the Republicans, but Democrats who courted them could still get a substantial portion of their votes (especially from those who were also social liberals).  Over the next five years, at least one Democrat would figure this out, while later the Republicans would forget this in one critical moment.  Between them, this man and that moment would lead to two of the most surprising election results of the 20th century.

I’ll have more on that in Part II.

American Politics Since 1988: Overview

This is the opening post in what I hope will be a series detailing what has happened in American politics over the last twenty years.  Whether or not I can actually pull the series off will depend on how much time I have to post this week.

I begin with the explanation for why I start with the 1988 presidential election.  For one, it was the first presidential election which I followed from beginning to end (although I was not quite old enough to vote).  Secondly, it could arguably be called the last election in the television era.  Four years later, talk radio and rapid response faxes began to reshape the way campaigns were run, to the point that the 1988 campaign was already ancient and quaint just over a decade after it was held.  Finally, 1988 was, IMHO, the last campaign that saw a candidate don the mantle of an economic conservative.  True, there were questions even then among the chattering classes about how well the mantle fit George H. W. Bush, but for the overwhelming majority of voters, the deal was sealed with “Read my lips; no new taxes!”

Since that point, the low-tax, limited-government philosophy that has been called economic libertarianism or economic conservatism has gone from the primary organizing worldview of the Republican Party (however briefly) to one only grudgingly acknowledged by the GOP.  Many Republican candidates, pundits, volunteers, campaign aides, and bloggers are already aware of this.  However, it is only half the story.  As the proceeding series of posts will show, economic conservatism has not only remained the silent majority in American politics throughout that time, but it has rewarded whichever political party is prepared to make it overtures - including the Democrats.

The reasons behind this are, on one level, complex, dealing with the interaction of economic and social issues, how low-tax groups send signal - directly and indirectly - to voters, and the largely unexplored political tactics of Democratic candidates.  At its heart, however, the explanation is simple: economic conservatives are a far more diverse group than most people - including politicians - recognize, and because of that, they can be far more open to candidates from either party.

Over the next few days, I hope to show this in more detail.

Spank That Donkey says privatize UVA

The blogger who incurred my wrath for his earlier posts on college tuition is now so hot and bothered over the latest UVA tuition hike that he wants to kick the school out of the state system.

Such a move would depart from nearly two hundred years of tradition, and take the state university system’s crown jewel out of its portfolio.  It is breathtakingly, shockingly radical.

In other words, it’s just about the best idea I’ve seen or heard regarding higher education in a long, long time.  Bravo, STD!

Speaking of Reconstruction . . .

Chris Beer (Mason Conservative) recommends a book on Southern Unionists and Radicals (Scalawags:  Southern Dissenters In The Civil War And Reconstruction) that I clearly need on my bookshelf (note to the uninitiated reader of this space: where Reconstruction is concerned, Radical is not a perjorative term in this space).

Mr. McDonnell, please do not succumb to Kilgorism

Today is a good day for Bob McDonnell and Bill Bolling - no doubt of that.  They won the endorsement of nearly every well-known Republican in the state for 2009 (Bearing Drift, Scott’s Morning Brew, and Virginia Virtucon).  Still, as soon as I saw it, a cold shiver went down my spine, and nothing in the rightosphere’s reaction has made it go away.

See, over the last few years, I have seen annual attempts to “unite the Republican Party in Virginia.”  They have all been followed by the same things: issue-less campaigns, lost leads, surprising (to some) defeats, recriminations, and grudges that go so deep into the next election cycle that the same people try to “bring the party together” and start the cycle all over again.

The first and most obvious of these fiascos came in 2005, when Jerry Kilgore led the state GOP ticket.  The party had just been through a vicious policy battle over taxes - one which became a political battle as several tax-hiking GOP Delegates faces primary challenges.  Kilgore had a choice: accept the division as a reality and pick sides, or make broad and bland “unity” statements that papered over the serious differences.

Kilgore chose the latter, and ended up with a lower percentage of the vote than any GOP nominee for Governor had earned in twenty years.

The next year, Senator George Allen faced a similar problem (albeit for different reasons), and chose the unity, issue-less approach in order to maximize Republican support for his re-election and (if he had won) 2008 presidential campaign.  His attacks on Webb (involving columns and books written more than twenty years ago) fell flat, Allen stumbled, and became the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate election in a dozen years.

Last year, a panicked GOP legislature cobbled together HB3202.  Their supposed life preserver turned out to be full of cement, and the Democrats won a State Senate majority for the first time since 1991 (the 1995 election led to a 20-20 split).

One can understand why I am concerned.  Of course, now that McDonnell and Bolling are the near-certain nominees, they need not follow this path.  Unfortunately, they each had a role in the HB3202 debacle (however small), and many Virginians who support limited government (including the small-l libertarians who have been voting for the Democrats on social issues), will be watching to see if they repeat that mistake this summer or reverse it.

If they repeat it, they risk a Kilgore redux (hence the post title).

Now, I know to reverse the mistake of the past will be “divisive.”  Numerous Republican leaders will howl and wail.  Still, McDonnell and Bolling can’t possibly have it any worse than Ronald Reagain in 1980 - whose right-wing views were so strident that one of this nomination opponents - John Andersen - actually ran against him in the general election as an independent, and won nearly 7% of the vote.

However, Reagan, buoyed by his strong limited-government principles, still won 51%, carried 44 states, and his coattails gave Republicans their first U.S. Senate majority since in over a quarter-century.

It is my hope that McDonnell avoids the Kilgore model for the Reagan one.  We shall see over the next year.

In Defense of Radical Reconstruction: Part II - the Uniqueness of Virginia

My last post dealt with the general history of Reconstruction; this one will deal specifically with Virginia, whose very unusual Reconstruction history has, I believe, led many native to the Commonwealth to take an unbalanced (in factual terms, not mental health terms) view of the entire era - a view best summed up by Jim Bowden here: “Reconstruction delayed integration and better race relations by ninety years.”

Jim appears to be of the opinion that had the North let well enough alone, the South made have moved forward on racial issues by itself.  Conventional wisdom holds that argument to be utterly ridiculous, and I myself think it to be flawed.  However, there is a very good reason Jim holds that view, one not very well known: in Virginia - it almost happened.  In fact, Virginia’s entire history in the last third of the nineteenth century separates it from South and North, in a way that frankly should do her sons and daughters proud.  To see how it happened, we have to go back to the end of the Civil War.

For starters, Virginia was unusual in that it had a functioning Unionist government throughout the War.  In mid-1861, Unionist Virginians met in Wheeling and restored the government of Virginia.  Lincoln recognized it quickly, and several Virginians represented the western counties in Congress.  After 1863, when the Unionist Virginia government allowed West Virginia to be formed, most Virginia Unionists (who basically gave themselves permission to form the new state) moved over to West Virginia politics.  Pierpoint, however, chose to remain Governor of Virginia, and thus when the war ended, he went to Richmond.  While he himself was hardly a Radical, he did push for a rewrite of the state constitution in 1867.  Large numbers of white Virginians refused to vote (in protest of black Virginians being given the right to do in the assembly elections), which assured a Radical Republican majority.

The resulting constitution, like many other Reconstruction southern constitutions, called for universal manhood suffrage except for ex-Confederates, and it is here that Virginia departed dramatically from the rest of the South.  In the other ten ex-rebel states, white Democrats, following their national party and President Johnson, focused most of their rage on black suffrage.  In Virginia, the leaders of the states non-Republicans did two very different things.  First, they refused to even call themselves Democrats, preferring instead the Conservative label.  Secondly, and most importantly, they did not oppose black voting rights.  Instead, they pleaded with the military commander in Virginia (which was under military control since the Reconstruction Act) to delay the vote on the constitution for one year and drop only the clause that disenfranchised rebel soldiers.

Caught off guard by the conciliatory tone of the Virginia leaders (known to history as the Committee of Nine), Washington assented, allowing the disenfranchisement clause to be voted separately from the rest of the constitution - in 1869.  That gave the Committee and their supporters enough time to pull off another unique political coup, the division of the state’s Republican Party.

Radicals and moderates had uneasy alliances in much of the nation’s GOP.  In Virginia, however, the “moderates” were led by New York-born Gilbert C. Walker, who could be best described as the first RINO in American history.  The Conservatives (i.e., Democrats) courted him heavily, and by 1869, Walker was leading something called the “Only True Republican” Party, made up largely of fellow RINOs.  Once again, Virginia’s ex-rebel leaders departed from the normal script, refused to run anyone for Governor in 1869, and threw their support to Walker.  He waxed the Radical Henry Wells in the 1869 election, took office, and easily won the withdrawal of federal troops from the state.

In every other state in the former Confederacy, the Radicals were in power and ascendancy, but in Virginia, the Radicals lost power before the state was readmitted into the Union.  Nowhere else did this happen.  That’s the first major Virginian difference.

The second involves Walker’s tenure as Governor.  During and before the War, Virginia had accumulated a hefty public works debt.  Despite the fact that 1/3 of the state was now gone (West Virginia), Walker chose to honor and recapitalize the entire debt.  When he took the added step of selling much of the state’s railway network for the proceeds to pay it, folks started wondering if the whole thing was designed to enrich his friends in New York.  Much like the rest of the “corruption” that surrounds Reconstruction, it’s hard to say where real misdeeds ended and hype began (as I recall, John S. Wise, son of Henry A., hinted that Walker’s brother was also a major bondholder in his semi-autobiographical The Lion’s Skin).  However, two things that made Virginia unique was (1) the involvement of massive, crippling debt that had been incurred before Reconstruction began, and (2) the corruption, or appearance of it, occurred when the Radicals were out of power, but before the perceived end of Reconstruction (Walker’s term as Governor ended in 1874).

So, while Virginia had its carpetbagger Governor with strong hints of corruption, the Radicals were his opposition, not the former Confederates.  This lead to the unique confluence of events that became the Readjuster Movement in Virginia.  More to the point, the fact that it was the so-called Redeemers that had the dirt on their hands was not only unique to Virginia, but also largely lost to the cursory review of history.

Most importantly, it is the Readjuster Movement that is the best evidence for Bowden’s assertion that the North “screwed up” Reconstruction.  In 1879, nearly ten years after the Radicals were turfed in Virginia, and two years after the last American soldier left all parts of the ex-Confederacy, a Confederate Major General (William Mahone) founded the Readjuster party, and built the first biracial coalition in the history of the South (and arguably, the first in American history).

It began as an argument over the Walker debt.  Many Virginians, including Mahone believe West Virginia should have to cover 1/3 of the obligation.  Walker supporters disagreed.  The arguments came to a head in 1879, when Mahone launched a Readjuster Democratic ticket for the state legislature.  Both the Readjusters and the Conservatives (they still called themselves that) ignored black voters (who were almost all Republicans anyway) - until they noticed the white vote was so closely divided that African-Americans could pick the winner.

Mahone made a deal with the Republicans - support the Readjusters and we’ll make it worth your while.  The result was Readjuster-Republican control of the legislature in the 1879 and 1881 elections, and the election of William Cameron on the Readjuster-Republican ticket for Governor in the latter year.  The movement did readjust the debt, but they also abolished the poll-tax and the whipping-post, equalized funding for the separate racial school systems, and included blacks in the state patronage network (Civil War Memory).  For two years, a functioning bi-racial coalition controlled Virginia at a time when the other ten ex-rebel states were marginalizing blacks as quickly as possible and even northern states (which had few African-Americans anyway) largely shunned them politically.

Sadly, it was not to last, as the Democrats (they called themselves this again, now) won the legislature in 1883 and the governorship in 1885, by which time the Readjusters had renamed themselves the Republican Party of Virginia (hence “RPV”).  Mahone’s Republicans would never win the state, but they did elect of majority of the state’s Congressmen in 1886, and nearly won the state for President Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

It is the failure of the Readjuster-Republican movement to last that, in the end, disproves Jim’s thesis.  Virginia was the state least affected by Reconstruction, yet racial equality was still thwarted.  In fact, the white supremacists in Virginia did everything they could to blacken the names of the Readjusters (pun intended).  I’m guessing several Virginians reading this post are seeing this information for the very first time.

Still, regardless of the argument between Jim and me, Virginians should be proud of their unique history.  This was arguably the only state in the Union that came even close to political equality in the nineteenth century - and that legacy lived on.  John S. Wise (The Lion’s Skin author) went on to represent black voters who sued the state over their disenfranchisement in the Constitution of 1902, making the Virginia-born Confederate veteran the first civil-rights lawyer of the twentieth century.  I would also humbly submit that the Readjuster impact (and the survival of its Republican descendant in the Shenandoah and New River Valleys) kept the Byrd organization from the more egregious racism of states further south, and thus made integration and civil rights here go a bit more smoothly (to say nothing of paving the way for the first African-American elected Governor in the nation’s history being here).  Virginia has its “sinful stain,” as Jim put it, but she also has a part of this era upon which her sons and daughters can look back with pride, if they only knew of it.