Jon Margolis , former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 ," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.
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One the morning of Election Day, David Plouffe , who managed Barack Obama’s campaign last year, was on NBC’s Today show to plug his new book, The Audacity to Win.
But first, co-host Meredith Vieira had to ask him about that day’s elections, and what it might mean for the President. Considering that Obama had campaigned “fiercely,” as she put it, for the Democratic candidates for governor of New Jersey and Virginia, would losses there call into question “his ability to deliver?”
Forget whether Obama actually did (or anybody can) campaign “fiercely.” Forget Plouffe’s answer, it being both forgettable and predictable. Instead, segue five days forward to the front page of the Week in Review section of Sunday’s New York Times, where reporter Peter Baker pondered whether Obama has “lost his oratorical touch.”
Writing after those two Democrats had in fact lost, Baker said “the limits of rhetoric were on display last week when the president could not rescue two foundering candidates in governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia.”
He didn’t deliver and he didn’t rescue. The bloom must be off the Obama rose. If this guy still had clout, he’d be able to deliver and rescue like…like…like…..
How about like nobody?
The purpose of today’s exercise is not to attack Peter Baker, who seems like a good reporter, or even Meredith Vieira, who no doubt is not responsible—or at least is not solely responsible—for the fact that the Today show detracts from the sum total of human knowledge almost every second it is on the air.
It is instead to pose the question of whether anybody in the news business these days has the foggiest idea about what happened in the world prior to, say, last Whitsuntide (May 31, 2009, if you were wondering).
The answer appears to be no.
The obligatory full disclosure: This assessment comes from a source no doubt older than either of the aforenamed, who therefore can actually remember (even if not as well as he used to) events that occurred some time back. This is an advantage one ought not flaunt. Everybody is a member of his or her generation, and well do I remember being taken aback when Richard Strout, who wrote The New Republic’s TRB column, came up to me and asked whether this Reagan fellow who had just become the Republican nominee didn’t remind me of Warren Harding.
Dick died a decade later, at 92.
On the other hand, we are not talking about ancient history here. Nothing before vaudeville. Let’s just go back to the guy who reminded Dick Stout of Warren Harding. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s job approval rating was above 60 percent. The Republicans had controlled the Senate since the 1980 election, thanks in part to Reagan’s popularity that year.
But some of the flotsam that got pulled in with his wake were not notably impressive. John Sears, Reagan’s political advisor, once candidly noted that had the Reaganites known they were going to do that well, they would have tried to get better candidates.
But Reagan was nothing if not a trooper. He travelled, as one of his political aides later recalled, “24,000 miles for 54 appearances in 22 states.”
And let’s remember that as a political performer, Reagan was no slouch. He was right up there with the best of them, Obama included.
Of the 18 Republicans seeking re-election that year, six were considered especially vulnerable: Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, Paula Hawkins of Florida, Mack Mattingly of Georgia, Mark Andrews of North Dakota, James Abdnor of South Dakota, and James Broyhill of North Carolina.
All had been elected for the first time in 1980 except Broyhill. But he was finishing the term of John East, also elected for the first time in 1980, who had died a few months earlier.
In campaigning for the endangered six, Reagan often told the adoring crowds that he knew they couldn’t vote for him again, but if they just cast their ballots for this Republican senator, it would like voting one more time for the Gipper.
All six of them lost, and the Democrats recaptured control of the Senate.
Had Reagan lost his oratorical touch? Hardly. But no matter how popular a president is, no matter how good he is on the stump, he can only win for himself. Reagan couldn’t pull those six turkeys in any more than he could prevent Democrat Chuck Robb from being elected governor of Virginia in 1981.
Any more than Dwight Eisenhower could block the election of a Democratic governor of New Jersey near the end of his first year in office.
Any more than Franklin D. Roosevelt could persuade Congress or the people to support his plan to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, right after his landslide re-election.
An hour poking around the University of Vermont Library did not allow me to confirm whether Eisenhower and Reagan had campaigned in Virginia and New Jersey in the off-off-year campaigns of their first terms. Tom Kean didn’t need Reagan (or anyone) in New Jersey and perhaps Reagan’s advisors kept him out of Virginia because all he’d be likely to do is provoke an even larger turnout among black voters, already inspired by the Reagan presidency to vote against him as often as possible.
As to Eisenhower, back in 1953 there would have been no point in him campaigning in Virginia, then still part of the solid, segregationist, Democratic South. And by the end of summer that year, Ike may well have known that Troast was toast. Turned out that the Republican candidate for governor, Paul Troast, had asked Gov. Tom Dewey of New York to commute the sentence of a labor racketeer named Joey Fay. Troast lost to Robert B. Meyner by 154,000 votes, more than Chris Christie’s margin over Jon Corzine the other day. Nothing Ike may have done could have changed the outcome.
When popular presidents are on the ballot themselves, they do have electoral “coattails,” though even these are often shorter and flimsier than often thought. When presidents are not on the ballot, it’s every candidate for him or her self. Assuming and/or suggesting otherwise is simply ignorant.
Not being able old enough to remember what happened in the past (almost none of us were around and aware in 1937) is no excuse. There are books. I’m reliably informed that there’s even this new thing called the Internet, on which a capable person can get all sorts of facts, some of them accurate. I suspect that both the New York Times and NBC have access to both sources of information.
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