June 2, 2007
FDR and Breaking Coalitions Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:30 PM EST A few days ago I wrote that Franklin Roosevelt’s margins of victory had steadily increased, a piece of misinformation I’ve carried around in my head since reviewing and presumably misreading a book on FDR and the press in 1991. John Steele Gordon politely pointed out the error, and Alex Burns wrote an interesting response about the remarkable stability of FDR’s vote totals over time, noting that Roosevelt’s political genius included keeping a large and potentially fragile coalition intact for more than 12 years. Of course, some of this success was the result of the Republicans not taking aim at a few of the most vulnerable fracture lines in the New Deal coalition. As Mr. Burns writes, “In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box.” Willkie toyed with exploiting isolationist and antiwar sentiment—in the election campaign of 1940 he supported conscription, then changed his mind, in pursuit of electoral advantage—but his heart wasn’t in it. Willkie was a liberal internationalist; after he lost the 1940 election, he passionately supported Lend Lease, and in the summer of 1941 he supported unlimited aid to the United Kingdom while it was fighting Hitler. He seems to have known what he was doing: his Wikipedia entry asserts that “Shortly before Willkie died, he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between ‘here lies a president’ or ‘here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,’ he would prefer the latter.” I hope Willkie really said that, because there is some evidence that it was true. Clay famously claimed that he’d rather be right than President, and as a wag noted, he was neither. Willkie, at least, was batting .500. Failing to effectively exploit a political adversary’s weakness, inhibited in doing so only by one or another scruple, is not the sort of story we tend to tell about our politicians nowadays. One of the better political novels written over the last couple of decades, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, told the opposite story: Politicians want to win, will do whatever it takes, and are by implication the clear moral inferiors of journalists, novelists, academics and whoever else writes about them. Primary Colors had the grace to seem sad about this alleged state of affairs, in which it makes a fairly striking contrast to the posture assumed by most political commentators I read in the daily or monthly press. It is interesting to speculate about just how archaic an example Willkie may be. Commentators on the Democrats’ refusal to politick more resolutely against a clearly unpopular war tend to explain that diffidence as simple cowardice, but it occurs to me that in some cases there may be something more Willkie-like at work. To take only joy from a disaster damaging to one’s country as well as to one’s political adversaries is scarcely unknown in American politics—to pick a single example, Nixon’s advisers in 1968 were allegedly gleeful when they heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—but it is not the only possible response to bad news, and assuming that it is seems perverse.
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