"The Liberal Crisis" by John Podhoretz
A little lenghty, butt: a very good read. John Podhoretz is one of the very best, and his insights into political history are quite good.
Enjoy the read I did. JR
The Liberal Crisis
John Podhoretz
December 2010
The defeat of Russ Feingold in the November 2 election has unexpectedly provided the most uncompromisingly left-wing Democrat in the U.S. Senate with a new job opportunity—that of candidate for the presidency of the United States. Feingold hinted in his concession speech on election night that he might challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. “It’s on to 2012,” Feingold said, “and it is on to our next adventure.”
The next day, a spokesman said that Feingold had “no interest” in running for the presidency, but such a denial is meaningless. The scale of the Democratic Party’s defeat and the parlous condition of the country’s finances inevitably raise the specter of a challenge to a first-term president from within his own party. Such challenges have been part of the political landscape for the past half-century. Eight presidents since 1960 have run for re-election. Four of them have had to fight off a significant primary opponent whose key message was that the president had betrayed his party’s core principles. In each case, the challenge preceded the president’s eventual ouster in the general election.
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In 1968, Eugene McCarthy came at Lyndon Johnson from the anti-war left and, in losing in the New Hampshire primary by a mere seven points, convinced the man who had won the biggest landslide in American history three years earlier that he could not secure a second full term. Ronald Reagan went at Gerald Ford in 1976 in part on the grounds that Ford was capitulating to the Soviet Union; Reagan went on to win several major states, galvanized the Republican Convention far more than its actual nominee, and left Ford to close a 30-point gap in the polls with Jimmy Carter (which Ford almost did).
With stagflation at home and chaos abroad, Edward Kennedy confronted Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. Kennedy went on to win 10 primaries, upstage Carter at the Democratic Convention just as Reagan had upstaged Ford, and in general, presage Carter’s doom. Twelve years later, George H. W. Bush began his re-election campaign in the economic doldrums and came under unexpected pressure in New Hampshire from the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, who got a stunning 38 percent. Ross Perot saw this and designed an independent bid against Bush on the single issue of the budget deficit, which Bush had actually taken aggressive measures to confront; Perot’s bid got Bill Clinton elected.1
There is great ideological irony here. McCarthy and Kennedy ran to their presidents’ left at the beginning of an election cycle that concluded with the victory of a hated conservative—Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980. Reagan ran to Ford’s right in an election that went to Carter. And by running to Bush’s right, Buchanan helped establish the conditions under which Clinton would achieve victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton ran as Southern moderates but began governing as aggressive liberals. Feingold, or any other Democrat who considers a challenge to Barack Obama, will have to contend with the knowledge that the better he does, the more likely it will be that a conservative Republican will occupy the White House come 2013.
Given this history, what conceivable justification can there be for a primary challenge to Obama for an ideologically driven politician who would not wish his worst enemies to achieve power? The only principled justification is, precisely, principle: you do so because you think the president of your party has acted in ways that are especially injurious to the things you believe in most deeply by suborning those beliefs to his political ambitions. Pat Buchanan’s quixotic effort against George H. W. Bush was driven by this; he opposed the Gulf War, had become a Bryanesque economic populist, and wanted to fight for his (repugnant) vision of what the Republican Party ought to be.
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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/vi...l-crisis-15577
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