The Politics of Negation

American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues. It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents. This thought sprang into my head as I was reading the angry and sometimes obscene Democratic Web logs and noted the preoccupation of some bloggers with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, now seven years in the past. For them this was a completely illegitimate exercise, because Clinton was being attacked for his sex life. I think this is wrong, since reasonable people could either (a) say Clinton deserved impeachment because he lied under oath in a federal court proceeding or (b) say that impeachment was inappropriate, because the offense was not central to his service in office. Naturally, most Republicans agreed with (a), and most Democrats with (b): We all tend to break ties in favor of the home team. The Democratic bloggers note correctly that impeachment didn't help the Republicans politically. But they still seem incensed, and I think that's because they believe that impeachment, in their view unfairly, tended to delegitimize the Clinton presidency.

It has been a habit of presidents to try to write their own history, to establish themselves as a legitimate embodiment of America's past and shaper of America's future. Franklin Roosevelt did it better than any other 20th-century president, relating his actions to those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and his onetime boss, Woodrow Wilson. FDR encouraged the idea that history is a story of progress toward an ever larger and more generous government. That version of American history was propagated by a brace of gifted historians and in most mainstream media.

Vision. For decades afterward, presidents were judged by the FDR standard. Harry Truman was crude and ineloquent, but he made tough decisions and got them mostly right (a view that stands up well). Dwight Eisenhower smiled and played golf but was an inarticulate bumbler (a version that doesn't stand up at all). John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were stalwart and compassionate liberals (which ignores the facts that they embarked on the Vietnam War and wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr.). Richard Nixon was a villain who left in disgrace (even though he extricated us from Vietnam and greatly expanded government).

Ronald Reagan wrote a different version of history. Like FDR, he showed that a strong and assertive America could advance freedom in the world. But unlike Roosevelt, he saw government at home as the problem, not the solution, and he utterly refuted the liberal elites who said that low-inflation economic growth was no longer possible and that America was on the defensive in the world. Not so. We've had low-inflation growth for most of the past 25 years, and the Soviet Union has disappeared. History doesn't always move left; sometimes it moves right.

Democrats unsurprisingly don't like this version of history, and in Bill Clinton they had a president with the articulateness and political instincts to offer his own. He could claim that his policies, like Reagan's, produced prodigious economic growth and that his limited military interventions promoted freedom and democracy. But impeachment cast a pall on his record, and so did September 11: Clinton (like George W. Bush in his first eight months) failed to address what turned out to be a deadly threat.

Bush's version of history is mostly in line with Reagan's. Since September 11 he has led an aggressive policy against foreign enemies, while lowering taxes and pursuing, with considerable success despite narrow Republican majorities, mostly conservative policies at home. Democratic politicians and the mainstream media, who bridle at the Reagan version and are disappointed that it has not been displaced by Clinton's, regarded Bush's victory in the Florida controversy as illegitimate and have been trying furiously to delegitimize him ever since. So far, this has proved at least as ineffective politically as impeachment was for the Republicans, but the impulse to persist seems irresistible.

How long will this continue? Democrats were used to writing our history in most of the past century. But without a competing vision of their own, they seem no more likely to succeed than Roosevelt's or Reagan's furious opponents.

Interestingly, Ronald Reagan's personal hero was...FDR.

Truth is, Reagan was an FDR Democrat and governed like one.

But by 1980, the Democrats (and Republicans) had shifted so far to the left, that Reagan's reprise of FDR looked like rock-ribbed conservatism.

The key to FDR, the nut of him, was that he was a NATIONALIST. A big spender with socialist tendencies? Sure. (And how's W Bush been any different, with his Medicare plan, etc.?, or Reagan, with his huge deficits?)
But above all, FDR was an American for America, militaristic (a former SecNav), more belligerent, really, than the country he led (until Pearl Harbor). He won based on a political alliance with the solid South.

Today, FDR would be considered a right wing religious extremist nationalist nut. He'd be on the RIGHT wing of the Republican Party. Reagan was the 1980s remake of FDR.

(Gingrich actually got this. One of Gingrich's first speeches as Speaker of the House, in full history professor mode, praised FDR as the President of the 20th Century. Accurately.)

It's funny how everything has drifted left, so far that former union leader and loyal FDR Democrat, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was viewed as a hard-right conservative by 1980. FDR was farther to the right than Reagan when it came to nationalist issues - a real racist in some senses; Reagan wasn't. (Can we really imagine Reagan putting Japanese into internment camps?)

CONGRESS'S Secret Saddam Tapes

Webb loss

Misrepresentations of Islam [Mohammed Pictures In Many Places. Made Up Outrage Alert!]

From time to time, I’ll ping on noteworthy articles about politics, foreign and military affairs. FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.

Ping bump.

" ... as I was reading the angry and sometimes obscene Democratic Web logs and noted the preoccupation of some bloggers with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, now seven years in the past. For them this was a completely illegitimate exercise, because Clinton was being attacked for his sex life. I think this is wrong, since reasonable people could either (a) say Clinton deserved impeachment because he lied under oath in a federal court proceeding or (b) say that impeachment was inappropriate, because the offense was not central to his service in office."

And the misinformation continues.

Had Kenneth Starr done his job and gone after the true crimes of the Clintons, of which there were many, the Clintons would have been removed.

Like Kerry and Kennedy, and much of the Democrat Party ilk, they are the enemies of this country.

Meanwhile, the American people, are being fed the continuous pap that we must be more "worldly" and acceptable to other cultures, even though those cultures are holding a sword to our throats.

Even as our public institutions of education, the Democrat Party, and the Fourth Estate are teaching, and preaching nothing but contempt for our founding principles.

Even as we struggle to breath the remaining free air, Stalin and Mao are laughing in their graves, while Saddan and bin Ladin, half the American voters, etal, are laughing in our faces.

"I think this is wrong, since reasonable people could either (a) say Clinton deserved impeachment because he lied under oath in a federal court proceeding or (b) say that impeachment was inappropriate, because the offense was not central to his service in office."

And the misinformation continues.

IIRC, all of that was true.

Had Kenneth Starr done his job and gone after the true crimes of the Clintons, of which there were many, the Clintons would have been removed.

Kenneth Starr had a specific and limited mandate. Whether Clinton was a rapist who enabled the transfer of warhead launching technology to the Chicoms, it was outside of Starr's purview.

Like Kerry and Kennedy, and much of the Democrat Party ilk, they are the enemies of this country.

The Democrat Party made impeachment a moot option at best when the Senate failed to remove Clinton. Impeachment and conviction with removal from office works on the honor system. It didn't work with the current Democrat Party. It's time for them to go the way of the Whig Party.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.