November 7, 2006
Campaign Tricks III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “About the scandal involving Grover Cleveland and the illegitimate child (‘Ma! Ma! where’s my pa?/ Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!’), I’m not sure why [Joshua Zeitz] puts ‘illegitimate child’ in quotes. There was no question the boy was both real and illegitimate, the question was whether or not Cleveland was the father.” I put the term in quotes because it’s an anachronism, and an offensive one at that. Just as we no longer call African-Americans “coloreds” and we don’t lump together Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian and Iranian citizens as “Orientals,” we’ve stopped calling the children of single parents “illegitimate.” Why? Because unlike in Grover Cleveland’s day, polite society no longer believes that a baby can be born an “illegitimate” human being. As to historical substance, Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Zeitz’s examples of recent dirty tricks are, ummm, conveniently one-sided. Indeed, they are Republican dirty tricks each and every one. I have no doubt whatever that the Republicans are quite as capable of dirty tricks and quite as guilty of putting them into effect as the Democrats.” Perhaps so, but the best Mr. Gordon can come up with is a juvenile act of tire slashing carried out by the son of a Democratic congresswoman. If Mr. Gordon actually believes that this episode is morally or constitutionally equivalent to coordinated efforts by a presidential administration or the National Republican Campaign Committee to violate federal laws, then he and I are living on different planets. As for his suggestion that George W. Bush had nothing to do with the push-poll carried out against John McCain, I repeat: Mr. Gordon and I are living on different planets. John McCain certainly believes that the Bush campaign coordinated these calls with an outside group. To bring this all back home, which is to say, to connect the discussion to American history, it’s worth noting that the current Republican robocall and push-poll tactics are but a technically sophisticated play on old tricks. In 1950 supporters of Richard Nixon’s Senate campaign hired phone bankers to call prospective voters and inform them that the Democratic candidate, Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, was married to a Jew. It was sort of like calling voters in South Carolina to inform them that John McCain fathered “an illegitimate black child.” Which is to say, it swayed voters who were stubbornly committed to old prejudices, and it had few if any visible connections to Nixon’s campaign committee.
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