Posted on 02/17/2017 6:33:55 AM PST by rdl6989
WASHINGTON — A former aide says former House Republican leader Bob Michel has died at age 93.
Michel was an affable Illinois congressman who served as leader of the GOP House minority for 14 years. His skill at seeking compromise with the Democrats was critical in helping Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush pursue their agendas during their presidential terms.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicago.suntimes.com ...
Republicans were weak and let the commie dems rule over them like Kings, that doesn’t mean the dems were “as conservative” it means the Republicans were weak.
Kennedy’s tax cut, actually passed after his death and signed by Johnson, lowered the top-rate from a MAOIST shameful 91% to a still disgusting and un-American 70-77% (it fluctuated thought the next few years I don’t know why)%.
It also cut the corporate rate from 52%, disgusting, to a 48%, symbolical important as it allowed companies to not have to fork over the MAJORITY of their income the federal government, but hardly anything.
It passed overwhelmingly but some in both parties voted no, I don’t know why some Republicans did, a sizable minority of House Republicans voted no.
Reagan reduced the top rate to a low of 28%, acceptable for a free capitalist nation. It’s since been jacked up to 39.6%, the same level Clinton jacked it that lost him Congress.
Thinking about what I wrote here yesterday on the debate of left vs. right within the GOP, there was a very key point I left out, and that was the issue of partisanship itself. This effectively superseded ideology. We still see it today, but I personally regard it as an affliction of the weak minded/stupid, rather than that of serious discernment we should all seek to undertake when analyzing candidates.
What I’m basically saying here is that, from what I observed in research, and our resident political historian, LS, can either agree or refute me on, is that effectively from the end of the Civil War clear up for almost 100 years, with some occasional variances, you could look at a given state or Congressional district and given how it stood with respect to the Civil War, ascertain the likely party they’d vote for, be it Presidential or Congressional.
It was effectively irrelevant whether the nominee of the Republicans or the Democrats was of the left or right, in many of these districts of bedrock party affiliation, they simply voted PARTY. You could have a firebreather populist or a mild-mannered Bourbon, it didn’t matter. The South was almost inevitably going to elect a Democrat regardless of ideology, the Northeast, a Republican (with some exceptions, such as NYC or Boston, but those were different reasons - NYC because it was never fully with Lincoln during the Civil War and was run almost continuously by a corrupt urban Democrat Machine, Tammany Hall. Boston was competitive if only because it didn’t assimilate Irish Catholics into the Republican party (for a brief time in the 1850s during the dissolution of the Whigs, many joined the Know-Nothing party, which was anti-Catholic, and the Irish never forget or fully forgave the Republicans who came out of that movement. So the most urban Irish Catholic areas began to go Democrat in the 1870s and never went back to the GOP, except in rare instances).
In the case of most Southern states, especially after Jim Crow, Republicans ceased entirely to run candidates (such as in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and most especially South Carolina, which was like a one-party apartheid state). Although the Democrats didn’t cease to exist in the Northeast or New England, if you were a Democrat in Vermont, you had no chance of being elected Governor or to Congress. None (as an example, from 1851 until 2006, only on one occasion was a Democrat elected to the House, excluding Bernie Sanders, and that was on one occasion in 1958, and that man was defeated in 1960). The memories of the Civil War lingered for a long time, and you were likely to vote the way your father and grandfather did.
Now some states were unusual, like Indiana, which on some occasions, would have highly competitive races between the parties. If there was to be a close Presidential contest, Indiana would be a bellwether (in 1868 and 1872 it would go for Grant, 1876 for Tilden, 1880 for Garfield, 1884 for Cleveland, 1888 for Harrison, back to Cleveland in 1892, McKinley in 1896 & 1900, etc.).
Curiously, after a half-century had passed between Reconstruction and the 1920s, the “Solid South” was beginning to see a crack develop, even if from the top-down at the Presidential level, and some Southerners were warming up to the party of Lincoln. In 1920, my state of Tennessee went for Harding over Democrat Cox, elected a Republican Governor and 5 out of the 10 House members, the most extensive “crack” in the wall this far south for the GOP. TN was unusual that it did have a consistent Republican presence in East TN, though there again that had to do with which side it was on during the Civil War (and it was Unionist in that part of the state, with some bits here and there along the Tennessee River in West TN). The “big” casualty in the 1920 elections in my state was the defeat of Cordell Hull in a rural Democrat district (which would later elect the Gores). Hull would reclaim the seat in 1922 and go on to become FDR’s Secretary of State, but this was a big warning at that time that the GOP could and would make inroads.
Alas, because of Hoover and the mishandling of what should’ve been the “Panic of 1929”, it killed off the fledgling GOP inroads by 1932, and would not reappear again until the 1950s and 1960s (or later, indeed, as it would be not until 1994 that the GOP finally won back the Cordell Hull seat). That, of course, would set off the beginning of the national realignment of the GOP being the usual majority party from 1860 until 1932 (excepting for the 1870s/1910s), retracting and retreating only to the most bedrock of Republican areas in the Northeast (even when FDR won in 1932, most of the state preferred to stick with Hoover outside of NYC). Even Massachusetts resisted a Democrat wave, keeping at or just above a majority of Republican members even in the 1930s. Only with the advent of the Kennedys would the Republican party there collapse rapidly beginning in the 1950s.
Even when FDR was elected, he had to cater to the Southern Solons that were the real power, especially in Congress once the Democrats took a majority. Although some were fine with an expansive government (such as the infamous racist Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who was also a crook), most scarcely were far removed from their views on Blacks as their ancestors who fought the War of Northern Aggression. FDR had to navigate the new dominant Democrat party through a huge group of differing interests (urban leftists, Northern Blacks (post-1936), labor, and the old-line Southern Dems).
When FDR settled on leftism and activist government as his main cause, the party began to see fissures, although it wouldn’t begin to have national implications for some time to come. Because there was a large segment of Democrats who weren’t left-wingers, FDR saw them as an impediment to his agenda and began to launch a purge of these “problem people” by the mid to late 1930s, which led to the repudiation election of 1938, where many Republicans were able to reclaim the seats washed away with 1932. Within 8 years more, they were remarkably able to reclaim, however fleetingly, the majority in the House again, although both the 1946 and 1952 elections were the last gasp for the pre-1932 Republican majority party. When it collapsed to mid 1930s proportions in the 1958 elections, the GOP would have to build a new majority coalition from scratch nationally, which would take decades to do at the Congressional levels, not reaching fruition until 1994.
It really wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s when many bedrock party areas of the country started to look beyond blind party loyalty and paid closer attention to ideology itself when you started to see a collapse of these formerly strong areas (Vermont, 1958; The Deep South in 1964), especially where electing Congressmembers were concerned. The districts that had elected a Republican in 1946 or 1952 may no longer be able to do so in 1960. Worse, Conservatism had gotten a black eye because of the leftist/media persecution of Sen. Joe McCarthy (nevermind he was right and vindicated by the Venona files), and suffered again in 1964 due to canonization of Jack Kennedy.
Of course, it panicked the Republican Establishment, who had been drifting leftward since FDR, and they believed the wave of the future for the party was to go left across the board (although the claim of being “socially tolerant”, “fiscal Conservative” was pure nonsense, especially in the case of the latter. These Eastern Establishment pols were spendthrifts beyond their Dem counterparts, notably Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who spent in the vicinity of a billion dollars in money of that era, to build his ugly Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY, which looks like it should be the capitol of the Empire in Star Wars). In one of the wealthiest districts in America, the Manhattan Silk Stocking district, from 1947 until 1959, it had a Conservative Republican Congressman named Frederic René Coudert, Jr. With the left-wing Rockefellerites in charge of the party, they all but ordered Coudert to vacate his seat for the handsome, urbane, left-wing (and STD-riddled) John Vliet Lindsay in 1958. Coudert kindly obliged. Lindsay would go on to later become one of the most destructive leftist Mayors in American history during his 8 years in New York City, which would ultimately result in a million residents of the city departing (including mine). Not until Giuliani 2 decades later would the damage he created begin to be repaired. Lindsay, of course, left to become a Democrat during his 2nd term, but the national party had little use for him.
This was not just a Republican thing, but even many of the remaining Conservative Democrats were similarly forced either to leave the party or move ideologically to the left in order to keep power. Many chose to do the latter (the falsehood that Southern Conservative Dems became Republicans is one of the “big lies” perpetrated by the media). The Conservative Dems were not necessarily just in the South, either. Even in NYC, you had James Joseph Delaney, but with Watergate and the flooding in of Congress in the 1970s by McGovernite radicals, hard-core Socialists and de facto Communists, they threatened the old Solons that if they were to keep their jobs, either as party chairs or even as Congressmembers, they would have to move hard to the left. Delaney did so, as did many Southern Democrats. Former liberal Democrats who had done the opposite and moved rightward, such as Portland (Oregon)’s Edith Green ended up leaving Congress outright (Portland would then elect a string of leftist moonbats ever since her departure), and she would endorse Gerald Ford for President in 1976.
To look at their Conservative scores pre-1974/76 and after at some of these Democrats was astonishing. They were forced to become national leftist Democrats. Those that didn’t just simply quit. Referencing the New Dealer liberal Sen. Theodore Bilbo, in MS, he was replaced by John Stennis in 1947. Stennis was once regarded as a Conservative, but by the 1980s, he was closer to Ted Kennedy than any Conservative Republican in his voting habits. Many of them considered themselves Democrats first, ideology be damned. It was due to the power of incumbency that some of these folks in both parties, however out of step they were with their districts ideologically, that allowed them to stay long after they should’ve remained.
Anyway, that’s a bit of the overview of ideology vs. party since the 19th century. I hope I didn’t put you folks to sleep.
I would only add to this excellent review that not only was it not ideological but from 1865 to 1900 it was HEAVILY religious. Paul Kleppner did a pathbreaking book showing that you could predict elections based on a dozen midwestern counties of certain protestant religious make-ups.
But as you point out, for the longest time, the Civil War determined everything-—”vote as you shot”.
Utah, for example, voted GOP for the longest time because of Lincoln’s positive treatment of the Mormons during the CW.
Re: partisanship and discernment
Historically you have a point and could maybe find individual cases not too long ago (Poshard/Ryan though redistricting would have given me pause as GOP retaking the State House was very possible) where one would prefer the rat (as you recall I didn’t agree on replacing L Graham with the Paulbot weirdo rat in 2008). Liarman/Weicker for CT Senate I believe Buckley backed Liarman. Color me “blank ballot” on that one, what a couple of prize turds. “Human Events” endorsed Kennedy over Lodge in 1952, a poor choice for more than 1 reason.
But today, it’s no longer acceptable to support any democrat in a partisan race (not that you have to back the RINO if you don’t want to) where you have another choice. The party’s agenda is purely Satanic and if you serve in hell you are a devil, period.
Ping to post 44.
Far from putting me to sleep, I found this to be an outstanding supplement to your previous post—though containing, proportionately somewhat less new material for me. Back in the 80’s my U.S. history teacher, using some of what you raised along with some other material, drove firmly home that between the Civil War and some point (likely 1930), that one essentially had, at the county level, a bunch of one-party systems that were not all that detatched from each other. About the same time I also came to realize that tribalism tops ideology with a solid majority of people.
With all that said, I’m still inclined to stand by my post 13—I think that to the founding ideology of the GOP was predominately a New England busy-body outlook coupled with a sort of snobbish moral superiority that I would identify as liberal, and think runs true through the Bushes—traceable in the family from Prescott to Jeb.
However, I think that you are far more equipped to argue both sides of the question than I, and I applaud your evenhandedness.
Thank you. I also learned about U.S. history at the same time as yourself, albeit with generalized and left-leaning social studies texts of the period. I was unusual in that I preferred to study these things myself and my mastery of the schoolbooks would bust the proverbial grading curve. The more I learned, however, the less leftist I became, to the chagrin of my teachers. Of course, I’ve lived in one of those “one party” Democrat counties here in Tennessee (Nashville), which although it has voted Republican on occasion for President (not since 1988, and that only barely) and for incumbent Governors or U.S. Senators with weak Democrat opposition, but otherwise last elected a GOP Congressmember during U.S. Grant’s reelection in 1872 (and that only because 2 Democrats split the vote in the general).
The study of political science in general can be a very difficult mastery if only because it is fraught with such illogic. Whereas in arithmetic 2+2=4, that’s an absolute. In politics 2+2 does not necessarily equal 4. It might be 5 or 6, it might be 3, or it might simply be “x.” I used to detest in higher math the requirement by the teacher to “show my work” as to how I necessarily came to a given conclusion. It was often not by conventional means I reached an answer, and by that same reckoning, how I’m able to navigate one of the ugliest endeavors of mankind, figuring out the ups and downs of politics and how they play out/work, etc. I try to stick to domestic politics, since foreign is often even more erratic and illogical.
I have to tread carefully not to make too generalistic comments on such a broad subject, as things aren’t often as cut and dry (as our resident political historian pointed out, injecting that religion has also played a substantial role, and the varying differences between the Christian sects from the Founders up to the modern era, or even the lack thereof in the past 50 years or so).
You’re also correct about tribalism (or racial politics). I have noted one thing, however, where the Democrats have basically never changed in their prevailing philosophy, explicitly that of a raw appeal to racism. Despite claims to the contrary by the media, the party has, since the era of the abolitionist, expertly exploited racial divides and fanned the flames of hatred, and continue to do so to this day. They like the notion of the perpetually aggrieved, be it in the 1870s where Southern populists were going to violent ends to throw off “Black rule” (or even more egregious to them, “Biracial coalitions”) or equally ugly and odious displays such as when Dubya ran for President that Black people would be being tied to and dragged behind trucks, Biden’s “They’re gonna put y’all in chains !” and all the ugliness we saw with the recent election.
With such ludicrous and laughably false rhetoric, especially aimed at a racial group that has been significantly diminished since they entrusted the Democrats with almost their entire group vote post-1964, and again often in urban or rural areas where they reside where Republicans hold no office locally up to the Congressional level during that aforementioned half-century period (or longer, such as the 1st district of IL, based in the South Side of Chicago, the “premier” Black district since 1928, whose last GOP representive left office in 1935, 4 years more recent than the last GOP Mayor of Chicago, whom was no prize himself) would require the services of not only a historian, but that of a clinical psychiatrist or psychologist to attempt to analyze the ramifications of that peculiar form of pathology.
In short, the definition of insanity (as Einstein claimed) is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. In the case of Chicago, 82 years of Blacks voting Democrat has gotten them precisely nowhere. It didn’t require a quantum physicist to reach the conclusion that Barack Obama would and could not produce a better outcome for them. Indeed, his was the inversion of MLK’s “dream”, that of electing a man on his race and not his character. Sadly, even when a Republican officeholder demonstrably improves the lot for Blacks, such as Reagan in improving the employment rate or Giuliani in NYC drastically reducing the number of Black murder victims from astronomical levels, neither get any credit for it.
Not even the Republicans in the 1960s who fought harder to get Civil Rights Laws enacted over obstructionist Democrats, instead rewarding the Democrats with 90% of their votes (or that the father of MLK, Jr. would appear with and campaign for someone like Jimmy Carter, who ran a notoriously racist campaign for Governor of GA in the 1970 Democrat primary !), while Republicans like Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose photo ought to hang in every Black household in America, is now completely forgotten, is an egregious injustice. That many miseducated and indoctrinated Blacks identify Abraham Lincoln as a Democrat shows that what has been done to them as a people by that party is as criminal, if not more so, than anything the Klan could ever conceive of. That Republicans, as a party, have stood by and allowed this to have persisted unchallenged and unchecked is equally egregious.
As for the claim to the founding of the GOP being “predominately a New England busy-body outlook coupled with a sort of snobbish moral superiority” is not entirely an incorrect conclusion, albeit a bit more complex. As was the case with the Democrats and Republicans having wide swaths of differing ideologies under one tent, this extended backwards as well to the Jacksonian era of the 1830s. The pre-Civil War Democrats had under its tent both abolitionists and States’ Rights folks. That they did not come permanently unglued was curious, as what befell the Whigs, as they two had to contend with two competing wings, known as Cottons (the upper crust pro-slavery types) and the Conscience Whigs (abolitionists).
In my state of Tennessee, for example, as generally was the case with what was then the “Western U.S.”, in the early days, it was basically one party, the Jeffersonians. Although a few might be found here and there, the Federalists generally didn’t make it past the East Coast out here to the frontier and the few that managed to secure Presidential appointments early on didn’t survive politically past Jefferson (such as Arthur St. Clair of Ohio, its first Governor, or Gov. Winthrop Sargent of Mississippi, or in the case of Gov. John Sevier in my state, he left his Federalist Party affiliation back in North Carolina, where he served as one in Congress). Still, you can basically trace the Republicans of today back to the Federalists.
It actually took until Andrew Jackson becoming President when TN gave him 95% of the vote (poor Henry Clay, who was just next door to us, got barely 4.6%) that he drove a massive fissure through the party support in the state. He all but created not only a Whig Party in TN to oppose him, but a Whig majority, which must’ve been quite galling to him. I live not far from his home, “The Hermitage”, and in his later years, Nashville was a Whig stronghold (albeit of the Cotton vintage). For a brief period in South Carolina, Jackson’s former Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, left the Democrats to form a Nullification opposition party and momentarily even tried to align with the Whigs to try to use it as a vehicle for States Rights and leave the Democrats behind for the Unionists and High Tariff types.
Of course, with all those opposing forces within the Whigs, the party that stood for everything stood for nothing, and they had to nominate candidates that, while credible as men, had to walk a fine line so as not to offend a wide segment of their party. As you’ll well recall, the 2 Whigs that won the Presidency never served a full term, with WH Harrison dying a month into his term and Zachary Taylor dying barely into his 2nd year, so we never saw what such a long-term (or even a full term) dominance of the executive would’ve accomplished (and neither of their VPs did much, John Tyler being a closet Democrat, was swiftly kicked from the Whigs as President, the only President to be stripped of party credentials in the history of the republic; and Millard Fillmore, amongst one of the more forgettable occupants. I couldn’t name anything of note that he did without looking it up. Fillmore had served previously in Congress from New York as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party when that was briefly a big deal).
When the Whigs effectively disintegrated with the 1854 mid-term elections, it did give Northern Democrat Abolitionists, Free-Soilers and Conscience Whigs a chance to form a like-minded ideological party. That might’ve been termed “liberal”, however the objection to that label would seem to imply Conservatives approved of slavery. Therein lies the bone of contention amongst historians and others ever since in trying to apply our definition of those labels today to the past. The same problem applies to the issue with respect to the position of John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson. Adams clearly wanted slavery ended, would that make him a liberal elitist ? He was lambasted as a Conservative Monarchist (the worst epithet you could throw at someone within memory of the Revolution). What would that make Jefferson, who might’ve put on a good show, but clearly was in no hurry where slavery was concerned (setting aside any alleged dalliances with Miss Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his beloved late wife) ? Would he be a Conservative ? He was a fan of the French Revolution, the rawest display of unbridled democracy in all its horror. That would place him as a man of the left. Hence the problem with trying to apply today’s labels again.
Add to that, since the traditional definition of right would be “Monarchist” (by European standards), all the Founding Fathers would be radical leftists, but yet they are “Conservative heroes” who freed us from the stifling conventions of English aristocracy. All this and more is why I’m uncomfortable labeling left vs. right prior to 1896 when the modern associations came clearer into focus on the political scene. Of course, back to social issues, you couldn’t start labeling people in that regard until the 1960s or 1970s (i.e. abortion).
Obviously, there was a touch of the Puritanical in the New England Republicans of the period, they were religiously devout and saw slavery as an abomination unworthy of a free republic. Would that make them liberal ? The same could be applied to the Moral Majority of the 1980s who felt the same about abortion, permissiveness in sexuality, gay rights, pornography, etc. They were similarly denounced as “busybodies” by libertines. You couldn’t call the latter Conservatives. Slavery supporters could make the argument that it was their business, guaranteed in law, and not for anyone to interfere with. That almost is closer to the hysterical women today screaming about “their bodies” in more vulgar terms to halt any attempts to stop infanticide.
As I was arguing recently, I had a dislike of certain figures, such as Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the early Republican figures (Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren now sits in his seat), if only because he was doing everything imaginable to deliberately foment sectional divisions to lead to war. A key, early hypocrisy of the party in wanting to end slavery did not extend to wanting to bring the formally enslaved peoples en masse to more sympathetic Northern states. It could be very easy living in such states wanting to dictate right and wrong far away in the South, especially when you didn’t have to live cheek to jowl with the ex-slaves. I recall a letter between a New England Congressman and a doctor discussing bringing ex-slaves up en masse, proposed by the doctor, but when the logistics and sheer numbers were hashed out and what it would do to the small, charming, lily-white towns being outnumbered by unemployed, uneducated slaves with limited skills, it would turn the most rabid abolitionist into a rabid segregationist.
Look at “liberal” Boston in the 1960s and early 1970s when school integration was ordered by federal judges and all hell broke loose (one group wanted to march to the house of and lynch the Republican Governor of the time, Frank Sargent). Gov. George Wallace went up there and snickered at the so-called tolerant Yankees completely losing it over busing, pointing out that most Southerners did not act out as violently. Obviously, folks don’t like the social order being jostled too much and too radically. Witness the left losing their minds with Trump and that in states with heavy illegal populations that they’re going to lose their cheap labor. The recent meme comes to mind that the Democrats haven’t been this angry since Lincoln freed the slaves. It really is true.
Anyway, I’d better stop for now. My posts are getting ridiculously long.
His wife ( who would have been shunned in Washington, D.C. society) conveniently died of a” heart attack” just before Jackson left to assume his role as president.
Convenient deaths seem to follow the Democrats ever since up until this day.
The personal attacks and stress of the 1828 campaign obviously proved critical to her. I’m amazed that Jackson wasn’t so deranged from anger when he took office that he didn’t take the proverbial flamethrower to DC.
Convenient how ? She died AFTER the 1828 Presidential election of a heart attack, brought on by stress and depression. No funny business should be ascribed here.
It's worth studying. Mrs. Jackson's death was very “convenient”, indeed! A modern forensic autopsy would be very interesting.
“Utah, for example, voted GOP for the longest time because of Lincoln’s positive treatment of the Mormons during the CW.”
Would Buchanan’s ‘Mormon War’ have played a role in their voting as well?
Some, but mainly Brigham Young asked Lincoln his intentions. He told a story about plowing a field that had a big tree stump in it. The stump was too wet to burn, to big to pull, so he just “plowed around it.” He said, “You tell Brigham Young that’s what I intend to do with Utah.”
Between 1950 & ‘70, did the majority of Republicans and Democrats disagree about abortion, capital punishment, gun rights, immigration, and/or affirmative action?
Your choice of time periods covers a great deal of change. In 1950, at least publically, I think that with the possible exception of immigration, most people in both parties were on the same page on all of these issues, with a few outliers on both sides. By 1970, there certainly were more divergent views, but they weren’t necessarily by party.
There used to be a heck of a lot more pro-life Dems (if 1970 is your cut off, colour Ted Kennedy pro-life). Nelson Rockefeller, the GOP VP under Ford, while serving as Governor of New York, signed a repeal of New York’s abortion laws in 1970—it was a little more open than he himself had proposed two years earlier, but to allow more abortions, he was willing to allow them all.
Reagan is the one who really made the Republicans the champions of the pro-life cause, though the Republican purge on the issue has never reached the point of the Democratic one.
I’m well aware of the influence of the Washington “Social Salons.” I’m suggesting your implication of any chicanery regarding her death is patently absurd. I might remind you that Jackson served in the Senate as recently as 3 years before his election to the Presidency, so she was already a “known” person to the society ladies.
I might also point out that President Jackson was quite able to navigate the minefield of the society ladies over the Peggy Eaton Affair, and had Mrs. Jackson lived throughout his two terms in the White House, it would’ve similarly been handled expertly.
Yes, at least publicly. It’s hard to tell what they “would have done” if allowed to vote, because the GOP never had a congressional majority, save once, between 1950 and 1994.
I wish Lillian Cross had never been born. Garner was an ok guy, right?
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