About Those Libertarians

Content Section Libertarians: The Great White Hope

Oct 30, 2013 2:15 PM EDT These days, anti-government zeal should appeal to just about everybody, right? But a new poll shows that libertarians' narrow base is nowhere near mainstream electoral success.

Politically, this has been a good year for libertarians. Not only do they have savvy champions in the form of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan (among others), but revelations of unprecedented government surveillance have made Americans more skeptical of the national security state and more open to a message of restraint in foreign policy. In addition, a growing number of conservative intellectuals see a populist libertarianism as key to the future of the Republican Party, while a smaller group of progressives have floated the idea of a left-libertarian alliance on national security to push against the Washington consensus of invasiveness and intervention.



Senator Rand Paul speaks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in Washington D.C. on June 13, 2013. (Gary Cameron/Reuters)

Unfortunately, if a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute is any indication, barriers exist to both plans. If this anti-establishment libertarianism has broad appeal, you should see hints of it in the demographic make-up of self-described libertarians; the ideology should have some appeal to more than a narrow slice of the public. But it doesn’t. Of those who identify as libertarian or who have views that mark them as such, 94 percent are non-Hispanic whites, and 68 percent are men, according to the poll. As for libertarian leaners, 81 percent are white, and 53 percent are men.

Let’s start with the push to expand the GOP’s appeal through smart application of libertarian ideology. The thinking is that libertarian populism has political appeal beyond the GOP and its traditional constituencies. “Americans look at Washington and know the game is rigged against them. Conservatives can promise to level the field by getting the bureaucrats and politicians out of it,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney after last year’s election. “Every small businessman, ambitious immigrant, and would-be-entrepreneur should be a Republican.”

Indeed, there’s little that distinguishes libertarians from ordinary Republicans. Fifty-seven percent identify as conservative, and close to half (45 percent) say that they’re Republicans, compared to the 5 percent who identify as Democrats. Thirty-five percent say that they’re independent, but odds are good they vote Republican—if political science is clear on anything, it’s that most “independents” behave like partisans. To wit, 39 percent of libertarians say they identify with the Tea Party, which makes them less supportive than Republicans, but far more than Americans overall.

True to their ideology, the vast majority of libertarians oppose the Affordable Care Act (96 percent), a higher minimum wage, and tougher environmental regulations. All of these views place them at odds with most Americans, who aren’t as hostile toward Obamacare (44 percent support the law, and a significant percentage opposes it because it doesn’t go far enough), favor raising the minimum wage to ten dollars (71 percent), and want stronger laws and regulations to protect the environment, even if they raise prices or cost jobs.

The wide assumption is that libertarians balance their free market economic views with social permissiveness, but this is only somewhat true. On abortion, 57 percent oppose making it more difficult for women to access the procedure. Seventy percent support physician-assisted suicide, and 71 percent favor marijuana legalization. Fifty-nine percent, however, oppose same-sex marriage, and while this is significantly less than Republicans overall, it’s also a deal-breaker for most progressives, who see marriage equality as a core issue.

To the rank-and-file, issues of personal autonomy and social equality just aren’t as important.



At a recent anti-surveillance rally in Washington D.C., former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson told Buzzfeed that an alliance of progressives and libertarians “should work.” And when you consider the places of intellectual agreement—from national security to criminal justice—this seems like it should be true. In practice, however, it’s hard to see how it would begin. By and large, actual libertarians are conservatives who like weed and aren’t as hostile to abortion as their more traditional counterparts. And while that’s nice, their substantial support for the Republican Party shows it isn’t as significant as it looks. When push comes to shove, their core priority is the size and scope of government’s intervention in the economy. To the rank-and-file, issues of personal autonomy and social equality—core concerns for liberals and progressives—just aren’t as important.

It’s for that reason as well that Republican elites should lower their expectations of what a libertarian turn could achieve for the party. Simply put, the people most receptive to a libertarian message—white men—are already committed to the GOP as a political institution. Women and minorities, by contrast, aren’t convinced of its relevance to their lives. And while the GOP could adopt a libertarian message on the drug war and mass incarceration—to win support from African Americans and Latinos, for instance—those groups will have to balance that against hostility to their perceived economic interests. I doubt Republicans will find themselves on the positive side of that ledger.

Libertarianism has much to contribute to our politics, and—on net—I think its influence is a welcome addition to a wide range of public policy questions. But, if this survey is any indication, libertarians are kidding themselves if they think their movement has electoral appeal to Americans. A narrow slice aside, it doesn’t.

Bosox

.The Bosox win and I am happy. I would have been happy if the Cardinals had won also. I grew up listening to the Cardinals on KMOX in St. Louis in the golden days of radio. Before the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966 and there was a team originally called the Houston Colt 45's the Cardinals were the South's team. Lou Brock was my favorite Cardinal player in that time. Musial, Boyer, Gibson and company. For the Sox the Curse of the Bambino is long over. Boston was the last team to integrate with Pumpsie Green in 1959. That's Boston for you. The Splendid Splinter is my fave Red Sock. There was a hitter! .406 still beats 56 in my book. There, I've told you all I know.



Michael Patrick and Lynne Maki like this..Pat Abernethy Murphree My mother loved the Cards--you ar eright they were the South's team. When they were playing on the west coast the radio would be on until 1 or 2 in the morning, or until the game was over.about an hour ago · Like · 1..Fred Hudson I forgot to mention the '46 Series in which the Cardinals beat the Red Sox. Country Slaughter scored from first base on a single to left field in one of the most discussed plays in baseball history. Musial bettered Williams.

The Kludge

Op-Ed Columnist


The Big KludgeBy PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 27, 2013 564 Comments
The good news about HealthCare.gov, the portal to Obamacare’s health exchange, is that the administration is no longer minimizing its problems. That’s the first step toward fixing the mess — and it will get fixed, although it’s anyone’s guess whether the new promise of a smoothly functioning system by the end of November will be met. We know, after all, that Obamacare is workable, since many states that chose to run their own exchanges are doing quite well.
But while we wait for the geeks to do their stuff, let’s ask a related question: Why did this thing have to be so complicated in the first place?



It’s true that the Affordable Care Act isn’t as complex as opponents make it out to be. Basically, it requires that insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone; it requires that each individual then buy one of these policies (the individual mandate); and it offers subsidies, depending on income, to keep insurance affordable.



Still, there’s a lot for people to go through. Not only do they have to choose insurers and plans, they have to submit a lot of personal information so the government can determine the size of their subsidies. And the software has to integrate all this information, getting it to all the relevant parties — which isn’t happening yet on the federal site.



Imagine, now, a much simpler system in which the government just pays your major medical expenses. In this hypothetical system you wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, nor would you have to provide lots of personal details. The government would be your insurer, and you’d be covered automatically by virtue of being an American.



Of course, we don’t have to imagine such a system, because it already exists. It’s called Medicare, it covers all Americans 65 and older, and it’s enormously popular. So why didn’t we just extend that system to cover everyone?



The proximate answer was politics: Medicare for all just wasn’t going to happen, given both the power of the insurance industry and the reluctance of workers who currently have good insurance through their employers to trade that insurance for something new. Given these political realities, the Affordable Care Act was probably all we could get — and make no mistake, it will vastly improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans.



Still, the fact remains that Obamacare is an immense kludge — a clumsy, ugly structure that more or less deals with a problem, but in an inefficient way.



The thing is, such better-than-nothing-but-pretty-bad solutions have become the norm in American governance. As Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University put it in a recent essay, we’ve become a “kludgeocracy.” And the main reason that is happening, I’d argue, is ideology.



To see what I mean, look at the constant demands that we make Medicare — which needs to work harder on cost control but does a better job even on that front than private insurers — both more complicated and worse. There are demands for means-testing, which would involve collecting all the personal information Obamacare needs but Medicare doesn’t. There is pressure to raise the Medicare age, forcing 65- and 66-year-old Americans to deal with private insurers instead.



And Republicans still dream of dismantling Medicare as we know it, instead giving seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. In effect, although they never say this, they want to convert Medicare into Obamacare.



Why would we want to do any of these things? You might say, to reduce the burden on taxpayers — but Medicare is cheaper than private insurance, so anything taxpayers might gain by hacking away at the program would be more than lost in higher premiums. And it’s not even clear that government spending would fall: the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that raising the Medicare age would produce almost no federal savings.



No, the assault on Medicare is really about an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the notion of the government helping people, and tries to make whatever help is given as limited and indirect as possible, restricting its scope and running it through private corporations. And this ideology, at a fundamental level — more fundamental, even, than vested interests — is why Obamacare ended up being a big kludge.



In saying this I don’t mean to excuse the officials and contractors who made such a mess of health reform’s first month. Nor, on the other side, am I suggesting that health reform should have waited until the political system was ready for single-payer. For now, the priority is to get this kludge working, and once that’s done, America will become a better place.



In the longer run, however, we have to tackle that ideology. A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

A Right Turn from Obamacare?

Monday, Oct 28, 2013 06:44 AM CDT


Here’s how GOP Obamacare hypocrisy backfires

GOP base doesn't understand right wants to turn Medicare, Social Security and more into a very similar program

By Michael Lind
The smartest thing yet written about the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange program is a post by Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute at his “Rortybomb” blog at Next New Deal. Konczal makes two points, each of which deserves careful pondering.



The first point is that to some degree the problems with the website have been caused by the overly complicated design of Obamacare itself. Instead of being a simple, universal program like Social Security or Medicare, the Affordable Care Act system is designed as if to illustrate Steven Teles’ notion of “kludgeocracy” or needless, counterproductive complexity in public policy. By using means-testing to vary subsidies among individuals and by trying to match individuals with private insurance companies, the ACA requires far more information about people who try to sign up than do simpler public programs like Social Security and Medicare. If Congress had passed Medicare for All, the left’s preferred simple, universal alternative to the kludgeocratic ACA mess, signing up would have been a lot easier and the potential for website snafus correspondingly less.



Konczal’s second point is even more important — the worst features of Obamacare are the very features that conservatives want to impose on all federal social policy: means-testing, a major role for the states, and subsidies to private providers instead of direct public provision of health or retirement benefits. This is not surprising, because Obamacare’s models are right-wing models — the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan in the 1990s and Mitt Romney’s “Romneycare” in Massachusetts.



This point is worth dwelling on. Conservatives want all social insurance to look like Obamacare. The radical right would like to replace Social Security with an Obamacare-like system, in which mandates or incentives pressure Americans to steer money into tax-favored savings accounts like 401(k)s and to purchase annuities at retirement, with means-tested subsidies to help the poor make their private purchases. And most conservative and libertarian plans for healthcare for the elderly involve replacing Medicare with a totally new system designed along the lines of Obamacare, with similar mandates or incentives to compel the elderly to buy private health insurance from for-profit corporations.





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If you don’t like Obamacare, you should really, really hate the proposed conservative alternatives to Social Security and Medicare. Konczal writes:



Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism. This point is floating out there, and it turns out to be a major problem for conservatives as well, so let’s make it clear and explicit here.



Building on an insightful discussion of public policy by means of subsidies or “coupons” published by the New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract initiative, Konczal contrasts the indirect, market-based, state-based neoliberal/conservative approach to social insurance that inspired Obamacare with the kind of universal federal social insurance preferred by liberals in the tradition of FDR and LBJ:



So this tells a story. Let’s refer to these features of social insurance, which are also playing a major role in the rollout problems, as “Category A.” Now, what would the opposite of this look like? Let’s define the opposite of this as “Category B” social insurance. And let’s take these two categories and chart them out:



Konczal speculates that the flaws of Obamacare may undermine public support for proposed conservative replacements of Social Security and Medicare:



However, the smarter conservatives who are thinking several moves ahead (e.g. Ross Douthat) understand that this failed rollout is a significant problem for conservatives. Because if all the problems are driven by means-testing, state-level decisions and privatization of social insurance, the fact that the core conservative plan for social insurance is focused like a laser beam on means-testing, block-granting and privatization is a rather large problem. As Ezra Klein notes, “Paul Ryan’s health-care plan — and his Medicare plan — would also require the government to run online insurance marketplaces.” Additionally, the Medicaid expansion is working well where it is being implemented, and the ACA is perhaps even bending the cost curve of Medicare, the two paths forward that conservatives don’t want to take.



Will the flaws of Obamacare really hurt the right and help center-left supporters of universal social insurance? I doubt it.



To begin with, this implies a willingness of the right to acknowledge that Obamacare, in its design, is essentially a conservative program, not a traditional liberal one. But we have just been through a presidential campaign in which Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts presided over the creation of the most important model for Obamacare, rejected any comparison of Romneycare with Obamacare. What is more, instead of agreeing with Konczal that the flaws of Obamacare are shared by most conservative entitlement reform proposals, conservatives are likely simply to denounce Obamacare as “socialism” or “collectivism” while promoting their own, Obamacare-like replacements for Social Security and Medicare, with blithe indifference to their own inconsistency.



Nor are progressives likely to press the point in present or future debates. Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy. These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating Obamacare, not as an essentially conservative program that is better than nothing, but as something it is not — namely, a great victory of progressive public policy on the scale of Social Security and Medicare.



In doing so, progressive defenders of Obamacare may inadvertently be digging the graves of Social Security and Medicare.



If Obamacare — built on means-testing, privatizing and decentralization to the states — is treated by progressives as the greatest liberal public policy success in the last half-century, then how will progressives be able to argue against proposals by conservative Republicans and center-right neoliberal Democrats to means-test, privatize and decentralize Social Security and Medicare in the years ahead?



I predict that it is only a matter of time before conservatives and Wall Street-backed “New Democrats” begin to argue that, with Obamacare in place, it makes no sense to have two separate healthcare systems for the middle class — Obamacare for working-age Americans, Medicare for retired Americans. They will suggest, in a great bipartisan chorus: Let’s get rid of Medicare, in favor of Lifelong Obamacare! Let’s require the elderly to keep purchasing private insurance until they die!



I’m sure a number of token “centrist” Democrats will be found, in due time, to support the replacement of Medicare by Lifelong Obamacare. And with neoliberal Democratic supporters of the proposal as cover, the overclass centrists of the corporate media will begin pushing for Lifelong Obamacare as the sober, responsible, “adult” policy in one unsigned editorial after another.



Once Medicare has been abolished in favor of Lifelong Obamacare, perhaps by a future neoliberal Democratic president like Clinton and Obama, Social Security won’t last very long.



The conservative Republicans and centrist Democrats will argue that the success of Obamacare, in both its initial version and the new and improved Lifelong Obamacare version, proves that a fee-based, means-tested, privatized and state-based system is superior to the universal, federal, tax-based Social Security program enacted nearly a century ago in the Dark Age known as the New Deal. We will be told that, in a world with computers and globalization and apps or whatever, simple, universal, one-size-fits all social insurance is obsolete. In the “new economy,” public policy needs to offer as many baffling choices as airlines or gyms, like the ridiculous bronze, silver, gold and platinum plans of Obamacare.



At some point in the future, the right will introduce a plan to replace Social Security with a system of individual mandates and fines to compel working-age Americans to invest in for-profit Wall Street mutual funds during one’s working years, and to compel them to buy annuities from for-profit money managers at retirement (which with the help of centrist Democrats will be postponed to 70 or beyond). The genuine progressives will respond with a defense of Social Security. Whereupon the faux-progressives, the neoliberal heirs of Carter, Clinton and Obama, will reject the option of preserving Social Security — why, that’s crazy left-wing radical talk! — but insist that the subsidies for the poorest of the elderly be slightly increased, as the price for their adoption of the conservative plan to destroy Social Security. Throughout the process, the right-wing Republicans and neoliberal Democrats will ask, “How can progressives object to means-testing, privatization and 50 state programs, when those are the very features of the Obamacare system that our friends on the left celebrate as a great achievement?”



Think about it, progressives. The real “suicide caucus” may consist of those on the center-left who, by passionately defending the Affordable Care Act rather than holding their noses, are unwittingly reinforcing the legitimacy of the right’s long-term strategy of repealing the greatest achievements of American

A Kennedy Book Review

Book review: ‘The Kennedy Half-Century’ by Larry J. Sabato



In “The Kennedy Half-Century,” political scientist Larry J. Sabato summarizes a recent poll that helps shed light on John F. Kennedy’s importance to Americans 50 years after his death. The survey, by Peter Hart and Geoff Garin, found JFK to be, by a wide margin, the most esteemed president since 1953 — a striking finding given Kennedy’s modest record of legislative achievement in office. Even more remarkable, his appeal transcends ideology: Fifty-two percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats in Hart and Garin’s poll called him one of America’s best leaders. By contrast, other strong finishers, such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, are deeply disliked by members of the opposite party.



Kennedy’s enduring hold over Americans of all political stripes is the theme Sabato uses to unite what are, in effect, three separate books sharing a pair of covers. The first section of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” about 130 pages, is a serviceable history of JFK’s career. Designed to set the stage for Sabato’s discussion of the five decades since the assassination, this extended prologue makes no pretense of offering a new interpretation of JFK’s presidency. That’s a legitimate choice in a book like this, whose purposes lie elsewhere, but without a new angle or any fresh insight, this first section can’t justify its considerable length. For a primer on JFK’s life and career, readers would do better with any number of recent biographies, such as Robert Dallek’s “An Unfinished Life” or Richard Reeves’s “President Kennedy: Profile of Power.”


While the book’s first section is perfunctory, the second part, which deals with the assassination, is somewhat wearying and likely to interest only those hard-core buffs — I realize there are many — who wallow in outré speculation about who was behind Kennedy’s murder. For many years, this monomania was a widespread popular pastime, and for understandable reasons: the sheer horror of the violence; the sudden loss of a young, dynamic, activist president; and the shared sense that as Lyndon Johnson’s presidency wore on, the decade’s reformist energies somehow went awry, raising painful questions of what might have been. But if the political and cultural impact of the assassination remains worthy of exploration, drawn-out ruminations on the details of the deed will probably strike most readers as not worth their time.



The most promising section of Sabato’s book — its heart — is the third part, which methodically reviews how presidents from Johnson through Barack Obama have made use of JFK’s legacy for their own ends. Sabato isn’t the first historian to attempt this sort of study. His account owes a clear debt to Paul Henggeler, whose book “The Kennedy Persuasion: The Politics of Style Since JFK” had a similar approach, as well as to other scholars who have explored what historian Alan Brinkley called, in his own essay on the topic, Kennedy’s “posthumous lives.” Looming in the background of Sabato’s project, too, is William Leuchtenburg’s “In the Shadow of FDR,” a history of Roosevelt’s continuing influence on the presidents who followed him.

The Plethora of JFK Books

The Jill Abramson essay below is a serviceable overview.  JFK remains elusive.  Aren't all great people in particular US Presidents elusive?  More than 40,000 books written so far about Kennedy?  That's hard to believe.  Not a great one yet?  Well, give it time I suppose.  The Richard Reeves book noted below is the best JFK book I've read so far.  This book focuses on the presidency, which is the greatest interest to me.  The personal life?  Interesting, but only in so far as it affected his performance in the White House.  I am reading the new Dalleck book.  It focuses on the presidential years and I like that.  I am not interested in assasination theories.  Until definitive proof surfaces of a conspiracy or a second shooter, Lee Harvey Oswalt killed this president and he acted alone and I am satisfied with this conclusion.  The essay makes me want to read the William Manchester book.  There is no end to books about John F. Kennedy.

The Elusive JFK

Kennedy, the Elusive PresidentBy JILL ABRAMSON

Published: October 22, 2013
As the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears, John F. Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down. One reason is that his martyrdom — for a generation of Americans still the most traumatic public event of their lives, 9/11 notwithstanding — has obscured much about the man and his accomplishments.
Sunday Book Review: J.F.K.: A Sampler (October 27, 2013)
Was Kennedy a great president, as many continue to think? Or was he a reckless and charming lightweight or, worse still, the first of our celebrities-in-chief? To what extent do his numerous personal failings, barely reported during his lifetime but amply documented since, overshadow or undermine his policy achievements? And what of those achievements — in civil rights and poverty, to name two issues his administration embraced. Weren’t the breakthroughs actually the doing of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson?



Even the basic facts of Kennedy’s death are still subject to heated argument. The historical consensus seems to have settled on Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, but conspiracy speculation abounds — involving Johnson, the C.I.A., the mob, Fidel Castro or a baroque combination of all of them. Many of the theories have been circulating for decades and have now found new life on the Internet, in Web sites febrile with unfiltered and at times unhinged musings.



Of course the Kennedy fixation is hardly limited to the digital world. An estimated 40,000 books about him have been published since his death, and this anniversary year has loosed another vast outpouring. Yet to explore the enormous literature is to be struck not by what’s there but by what’s missing. Readers can choose from many books but surprisingly few good ones, and not one really outstanding one.



It is a curious state of affairs, and some of the nation’s leading historians wonder about it. “There is such fascination in the country about the anniversary, but there is no great book about Kennedy,” Robert Caro lamented when I spoke to him not long ago. The situation is all the stranger, he added, since Kennedy’s life and death form “one of the great American stories.” Caro should know. His epic life of Johnson (four volumes and counting) brilliantly captures parts of the Kennedy saga, especially the assassination in Dallas, revisited in the latest installment, “The Passage of Power.”



Robert Dallek, the author of “An Unfinished Life,” probably the best single-volume Kennedy biography, suggests that the cultish atmosphere surrounding, and perhaps smothering, the actual man may be the reason for the deficit of good writing about him. “The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a celebrity, so historians are not really impressed by him,” Dallek told me. “Historians see him more as a celebrity who didn’t accomplish very much.” Dallek also pointed to a second inhibiting factor, the commercial pressure authors feel to come up with sensational new material. His own book, as it happens, included a good deal of fresh information on Kennedy’s severe health problems and their cover-up by those closest to him. And yet Dallek is careful not to let these revelations overwhelm the larger story.



Dallek is also good on the fairy-tale aspects of the Kennedy family history, and he closely examines the workings of the Kennedy White House. So enthralled was he by this last topic that he has written a follow-up, “Camelot’s Court,” which profiles members of Kennedy’s famous brain trust and is being released for the 50th anniversary. This time, however, it is Dallek who doesn’t offer much fresh material.



This in turn raises another question: How much is left to say about Kennedy’s presidency? The signature legislative accomplishments he and his advisers envisioned were not enacted until after his death. Then there is the Vietnam conundrum. Some maintain that Kennedy would not have escalated the war as Johnson did. But the belief that he would have limited the American presence in Vietnam is rooted as much in the romance of “what might have been” as in the documented record.



Indeed, a dolorous mood of “what might have been” hangs over a good deal of writing about Kennedy. Arriving in time for Nov. 22 is the loathsomely titled “If Kennedy Lived. The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History,” by the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, who imagines a completed first Kennedy term and then a second. This isn’t new territory for Greenfield, who worked for Kennedy’s brother Robert and is the author of a previous book of presidential “what ifs” called “Then Everything Changed.” (Dallek’s “Camelot’s Court” and Greenfield’s “If Kennedy Lived” are reviewed here.)



Thurston Clarke, the author of two previous and quite serviceable books on the Kennedys, also dwells on fanciful “what might have beens” in “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” suggesting that the death of the presidential couple’s last child, Patrick, brought the grieving parents closer together and may have signaled the end of Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing. What’s more, Clarke makes a giant (and dubious) leap about Kennedy as leader, arguing that in the final 100 days he was becoming a great president. One example, according to Clarke, was his persuading the conservative Republicans Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, and Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, to support a civil rights bill. Once re-elected, Kennedy would have pushed the bill through Congress.



Kennedy as Arthurian hero is also a feature of what has been called “pundit lit” by the historian and journalist David Greenberg. The purpose of this genre (books by writers who themselves are famous) is, in Greenberg’s words, “to extend their authors’ brands — to make money, to be sure, and to express some set of ideas, however vague, but mainly to keep their celebrity creators in the media spotlight.” The champion in this growing field is Bill O’Reilly, who has milked the Kennedy assassination with unique efficiency.



O’Reilly’s latest contribution, “Kennedy’s Last Days,” is an illustrated recycling, for children, of his mega-best seller “Killing Kennedy.” This new version, it must be said, distinctly improves on the original, whose choppy sentences, many written in the present tense, lose nothing when recast for younger readers. “He is on a collision course with evil,” O’Reilly declares. No less elevated is his discussion of Kennedy’s decision to visit Dallas despite warnings of roiling violence, including the physical assault on his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, who had given a speech in the city in October 1963. “J.F.K. has decided to visit Big D,” O’Reilly writes. “There is no backing down.” Happily, the wooden prose is offset by the many illustrations. My favorite is a spread on the first family’s pets, including puppies and a pony.



Bad books by celebrity authors shouldn’t surprise us, even when the subject is an American president. The true mystery in Kennedy’s case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix him on the page.



For some, the trouble has been idolatry. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote three magisterial volumes on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, attempted a similar history in “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” Published in 1965, it has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Harvard contemporary, had been on the White House staff, brought in as court historian. He witnessed many of the events he describes. But in his admiration for Kennedy, he became a chief architect of the Camelot myth and so failed, in the end, to give a persuasive account of the actual presidency.



In 1993, the political journalist Richard Reeves did better. “President Kennedy: Profile of Power” is a minutely detailed chronicle of the Kennedy White House. As a primer on Kennedy’s decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. What’s missing is a picture of Kennedy’s personal life, though Reeves includes a passing mention of Marilyn Monroe being sewn into the $5,000 flesh-colored, skintight dress she wore to celebrate the president’s birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (This is the place to note that Reeves edited “The Kennedy Years,” The New York Times’s own addition to the ever-­expanding Kennedy cosmos, and I wrote the foreword.)



Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, like Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh wildly posits connections between the Kennedys and the mob, while Wills, though he offers any number of brilliant insights into Kennedy and his circle of courtiers, fixates on the Kennedy brothers’ (and father’s) sexual escapades in “The Kennedy Imprisonment.”



The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians. We have first-rate books on Jefferson, on Lincoln, on Wilson, on both Roosevelts. Even unloved presidents have received major books: Johnson (Caro) and Richard Nixon (Wills, among others). Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.



Why is this the case? One reason is that even during his lifetime, Kennedy defeated or outwitted the most powerfully analytic and intuitive minds.



In 1960, Esquire magazine commissioned Norman Mailer’s first major piece of political journalism, asking him to report on the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that nominated Kennedy. Mailer’s long virtuoso article, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” came as close as any book or essay ever has to capturing Kennedy’s essence, though that essence, Mailer candidly acknowledged, was enigmatic. Here was a 43-year-old man whose irony and grace were keyed to the national temper in 1960. Kennedy’s presence, youthful and light, was at once soothing and disruptive, with a touch of brusqueness. He carried himself “with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell ended the round.” Finally, however, “there was an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man present in the room with all his weight and all his mind.”



Mailer himself doesn’t know “whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself.”



And yet Kennedy’s unreality, in Mailer’s view, may have answered the particular craving of a particular historical moment. “It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.” Those words seemed to prophesy the Kennedy mystique that was to come, reinforced by the whisker-thin victory over Nixon in the general election, by the romantic excitements of Camelot and then by the horror of Dallas.



Fifty years later we are still sifting through the facts of the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Kennedy had been killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Edward Jay Epstein and Mark Lane were among the first writers to challenge that finding, and their skepticism loosed a tide of investigations. The 50th anniversary has washed in some new ones. Among the more ambitious is “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” a work of more than 500 pages. Its author, Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, uncovered a new lead, in the person of a heretofore overlooked woman who may have had suspicious ties to the assassin. But when Shenon finds the woman, now in her 70s, in Mexico, she denies having had a relationship with Oswald, and Shenon’s encounters with her prove more mysterious than illuminating.



Kennedy’s murder was bound to attract novelists, and some have approached the subject inventively, if with strange results. Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” a best seller published in 2011, takes the form of a time-travel romp involving a high school English teacher who finds romance in Texas while keeping tabs on Oswald. At more than 800 pages, the novel demands a commitment that exceeds its entertainment value.



I rather like Mailer’s “Oswald’s Tale,” published in 1995. It is, like his earlier masterpiece “The Executioner’s Song,” a work of “faction,” which is Mailer’s term for his hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. Mailer and his colleague, Lawrence Schiller, spent six months in Russia examining Oswald’s K.G.B. files, and the huge quasi novel that came out of it contains a good deal of engrossing material about Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, as well as the odd assortment of people the couple mixed with in Texas. Mailer’s narrative skills are prodigious, but in the end he has little to tell us that wasn’t already uncovered by Priscilla Johnson McMillan in “Marina and Lee,” her nonfiction portrait of the troubled couple from 1977. (Mailer properly credits McMillan’s book.)



Most critics seem to think the outstanding example of Kennedy assassination fiction is “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel, published in 1988. The narrative is indeed taut and bracing. But the challenge DeLillo set for himself, to provide readers with “a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years,” exceeds even his lavish gifts.



It is telling that DeLillo reverts to the shadowy realm of “half-facts.” Their persistence raises the question of just how many secrets remain, not only about Kennedy’s death but also about his life. And if there are secrets, who is guarding them, and why?



One clue has been furnished by the historian Nigel Hamilton, whose book “JFK: Reckless Youth,” published in 1992, was the first in a planned multivolume biography that promised to be a valuable addition to the current literature. (He has since dropped the project.) While the book was gossipy, especially on the subject of the young Kennedy’s sexual adventures, Hamilton also provided a vivid and lively account of Kennedy’s successful 1946 campaign for Congress. But when Hamilton began work on the next volumes, he said he came under a sustained barrage by Kennedy loyalists. “The family leaned upon well-known historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Doris Goodwin to write protest letters to the press,” Hamilton wrote in 2011 in The Huffington Post. “I was warned that no Kennedy-era official or friend would be ‘allowed’ to speak to me for my proposed sequel.”



Kennedy may have enjoyed the company of writers, but the long history of secrecy and mythmaking has surely contributed to the paucity of good books. The Kennedys — especially Jackie and Bobby — were notoriously hard on authors whose books they didn’t like. And they enlisted Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen and other intimates to act as a kind of history police, not only withholding primary materials but also bullying writers. A prominent historian recently told me he was once warned by Schlesinger, with whom he had been friendly, that because he had invited Hamilton to a meeting of the American Historical Association he might himself be banished from the organization. In recent years, the protective seal seems to have loosened. The Kennedy family, including Edward Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, gave unfettered access to their father’s papers to David Nasaw, the author of “The Patriarch,” a well-received biography of Joseph P. Kennedy that appeared last year.



Caroline Kennedy has been even more open to the claims of history. She herself was involved in the publication of two books and the release of accompanying tapes. One of them, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy,” contains the transcripts of the first lady’s interviews about her husband with Schlesinger, conducted in 1964 but kept secret until 2011. They are revealing and mesmerizing. The other, “Listening In,” offers White House conversations captured in a secretly installed taping system in the Oval Office. Since Kennedy controlled the device, these conversations are more guarded, but the book includes at least one memorable moment, when the president hilariously loses his temper over unflattering press about the $5,000 cost of Mrs. Kennedy’s hospital maternity suite — “Are they crazy up there? Now you know what that’s gonna do? Any congressman is going to get up and say, ‘Christ, if they can throw $5,000 away on this, let’s cut ’em another billion dollars.’ You just sank the Air Force budget!”



The most disturbing case of the family’s attempts to control history came early on, and it involved William Manchester, the historian chosen by the Kennedys a few weeks after the assassination to write the authorized account, “The Death of a President.” Manchester was selected because of a previous, and fawning, book he had written about Kennedy, “Portrait of a President.” (In a bizarre twist, this was one of the books Lee Harvey Oswald checked out of a New Orleans public library just months before the assassination.) Manchester was given sole access to almost all the president’s men as well as to his widow and virtually every principal figure. (Lyndon Johnson submitted answers in writing through his staff.) It seemed the ideal arrangement — until Manchester presented a manuscript to the Kennedys.



In a gripping piece from his 1976 collection of essays, “Controversy,” Manchester described what happened next. First there were the many insertions and deletions made by various Kennedy minions, who applied so much pressure that Manchester became a nervous wreck. An especially low point came when Robert Kennedy hunted Manchester down in a New York hotel room and banged on the door, demanding to be let in to argue for still more changes. Next, Jackie Kennedy, who had not bothered to read the manuscript, accepted the view of her factotums that many of its details, like the fact that she carried cigarettes in her purse, were too personal. Further angered by the $665,000 Manchester had received from Look magazine for serial rights, Mrs. Kennedy went to court to enjoin the author from publishing the book. Eventually, she settled out of court and finally read “The Death of a President” when it was published in 1967. She deemed it “fascinating.”



Nevertheless, the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to “The Death of a President,” allowed it to go out of print, and for a number of years copies could be found only online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the best, of the 50th anniversary is that Little, Brown has now reissued paperback and e-book editions.



It’s good news because, remarkably, and against all odds, Manchester (who died in 2004) wrote an extraordinary book. There are obvious defects. Predictably, he blares the trumpets of Camelot, and he has a weakness for melodrama. It’s hard to believe, even at the time of Kennedy’s murder, that to the world it was “as though the Axis powers had surrendered and Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt had died in the hours between noon and midafternoon in Washington of a single day in 1945.” But these excesses don’t really matter, thanks to Manchester’s vivid reporting, masterly narrative and authentically poetic touches.



It is in small, quiet scenes that Manchester’s chronicle accumulates its greatest force. When it is time for Dave Powers, the slain president’s aide and sidekick, to pick out the clothes Kennedy will wear to his grave, he selects from eight suits and four pairs of shoes brought out by Kennedy’s valet, George Thomas. Powers settles on a blue-gray suit, black shoes and “a blue tie with a slight pattern of light dots.” An embroidered “JFK” on the white silk shirt is hidden from view. The valet remembered that Kennedy’s “dislike of flamboyant monograms had extended to handkerchiefs,” Manchester writes. The president “had carefully folded them so that the initials would not show, and Thomas did it for him now, slipping the handkerchief into his coat pocket.”



Of all that has been written and that will be read on this 50th anniversary, it is the last paragraphs of “The Death of a President” that deserve to stand out from everything else. Manchester describes viewing the bloodstained pink suit Jackie Kennedy wore on Nov. 22, 1963, which had since been stowed in a Georgetown attic:





Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the bright midday glare of Dallas lie in an attic not far from 3017 N Street. In Bethesda that night those closest to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never see them again. She hasn’t. Yet they are still there, in one of two long brown paper cartons thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked “September 12, 1953,” the date of her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is “Worn by Jackie, November 22, 1963.” Inside, neatly arranged, are the pink wool suit, the black shift, the low-heeled shoes and, wrapped in a white towel, the stockings. Were the box to be opened by an intruder from some land so remote that the name, the date and photographs of the ensemble had not been published and republished until they had been graven upon his memory, he might conclude that these were merely stylish garments which had passed out of fashion and which, because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had not been discarded.





If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The memento of a happy time would be cleaned before storing. Obviously this costume has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The handbag’s leather and the inside of each shoe are caked dark red. And the stockings are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but time and the sheerness of the fabric have altered it. The rusty clots have flaked off; they lie in tiny brittle grains on the nap of the towel. Examining them closely, the intruder would see his error. This clothing, he would perceive, had not been kept out of sentiment. He would realize that it had been worn by a slender young woman who had met with some dreadful accident. He might ponder whether she had survived. He might even wonder who had been to blame.





Unfortunately, the tapes of Manchester’s two five-hour interviews with Jackie Kennedy, who seems to have regretted her frankness, remain under seal at the Kennedy Library until 2067. This is a final sadness for a reader sifting through these many books. Taken together, they tell us all too little about this president, now gone 50 years, who remains as elusive in death as he was in life.





Jill Abramson is the executive editor of The Times.

Cold Snap!

Cold weather is here in Shelby County. Time to get the long johns out of the closet. Time to prune my winter wardrobe a bit. 1990 is the cutoff. Every item of clothing before then is leaving the house. I think I've finally gotten my money's worth pre 1990, but it's still painful to discard any item of clothing in my little life. Haven't bought anything new since about 2002. Needless to say, I do not maintain a clothes budget with underwear going back to the Clinton Administration.




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Sheila Bloom, Lucy Horsley Lewis, Michael Patrick and 3 others like this..View 1 more comment..Fred Hudson On the other hand I held on to my 1974 leisure suit into the 90's and it never came back. No chic!4 hours ago · Like..Diane Bystrom Ya win some, ya lose some.3 hours ago · Like..Moyna O'Riley Hudson The problem is, even IF (though I know it won't) your clothes did become retro chic, you couldn't fit into them! Just sayin'....

Example: your $3.95 shirt from Sherman's.3 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2..Sheila Bloom Winter has struck down here. I don't wear gloves. Lose them.2 hours ago via mobile · Like..

No Meteor, Please!

White House Sets November Obamacare Deadline [Updated]By Jonathan Chait 0 22 In a conference call with reporters today, Jeffrey Zients, the Obama administration's new person in charge of its health-care website, promised the site would be generally operational by the end of November. That's also the rough time frame necessary for people who have to have insurance beginning January 1. (If you want coverage by the start of January, when the new law begins, you need to sign up by December 15, though open enrollment lasts through March.)



The administration is obviously putting its neck on the line here. If it fails to hit the deadline, all political hell will break loose. (There is a little wiggle room, as the promise applies to "the vast majority of users.") Therefore, presumably, the administration is extremely confident it can hit this deadline. On the other hand, it was also extremely confident it could have the site working reasonably well by October 1. So Obama apparently believes not only that his administration can fix the technical problem, but also that it has already fixed the managerial problem that caused it to underestimate its technical problem.



There's also the third possibility: The administration has learned that a large meteor will destroy the world on or before November 30, and wants to live out its remaining time on the planet in relative peace, rather than dodging "are we there yet?" questions about the website every day. So basically the possibilities are:



1) They know what they're doing.



2) They have fooled themselves into thinking they know what they're doing, but don't.



3) Meteor.



Update: When asked via email if the meteor scenario is correct, a senior Obama administration official replied, "No!!!"



Of course, this is exactly what they would say if they were in fact expecting a meteor, and hoping to distract Americans from demanding spaces on the escape rockets they were secretly constructing with the money they told us was being used to fix the website.

In Search of Lost Time

.The woman who gave me life would have been 101 today. She was a Hankins of Lamar County, Alabama. Those Hankinses were a tough and gritty bunch, yet a sweet, loving, and caring people. There were the sisters, Ruby and Aileen, and the brother Bryan. She was the last one left when she died in 1996. Happy Birthday to my Mother!


Michael Patrick, Michael Dew, Kimberly Scott Duval and 17 others like this..Linda Alexander Hester She was an awesome lady. A great sense of humor, obviously hereditary!15 hours ago · Unlike · 2..Don Waller She gave birth to you and survived to be 84? I miss her too14 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 2..



.I'm in search of lost time---remembrance of things past--here in Lee County, living on slow time, on the cusp of the Chattahoochee Valley, where slow time and fast time mingle daily. One day I'll visit that flea market at Smith's Station where maybe I can find a coat for the winter and get lost in time in Moundville where I can truly go back in time and maybe even consider running for the statehouse if I can raise the money. Time, time, time, see what's become of me as I consider my possibilities. Soon the sky will be a hazy shade of winter. In the meantime would you stop and remember me at any convenient time?



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Hank Henley, Sheila Bloom, Michael Patrick and 2 others like this..Freddy Hudson Proust would enjoy Moundville.

A Month Away

We're a month away from remembering the 50th Anniversary of the assasination of you know who. Last year I visited the 6th floor museum. I saw the exact spot from whence LHO fired the fatal shots. Looking down from that window you can see what an easy shot he had. The infamous grass knoll was a disappointment. Not much too it. As long as there is money to be made from assasination conspiracy t...heories there will be no end to it. Just because the Mafia, Castro, the Soviets, the CIA, the FBI, and the right wing John Birch Society etc. of 20 million people strong headquartered in Dallas wanted him dead doesn't mean there was a conspiracy. Have you ever tried to get all of those people listed above together to do anything jointly? Read up on LHO. He just happened to get a job at the Depository a few weeks before 11/22 before the President's motorcade route became known. Nobody was shooting from the grassy knoll. Go to Dealey Plaza. See for yourself. Get a life people. The Marxist LHO acted alone though influenced by all kinds of anti-American and pro-Castro sentiment. Who REALLY killed JFK? We know; we just have to admit the truth.

The Legacy of White Supremacy

Saturday, Oct 19, 2013 01:00 PM CDT
How the toxic effects of white supremacy, seen so clearly in "12 Years a Slave," endure in American politics

By Andrew O'Hehir


Five years before the beginning of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee – future commander of the Confederate States of America’s Army of Northern Virginia – wrote a famous letter to Franklin Pierce, the profoundly inept outgoing president. After praising Pierce for his pro-Southern policies, Lee wrote: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.” (That phrase was likely meant as a mild rebuke to Pierce, who may not have felt that way.)



This letter has long struck historians as significant because of its apparent paradox: A few years later, Lee would command hundreds of thousands of young men to kill and die for a cause he personally believed was immoral, a cause his great adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, would describe as “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Lee was of course not the first white American to be pinioned by this paradox, which was written into our Constitution, with its oblique references to “other persons” existing in certain states who were to be counted as three-fifths of a human being. Nor was he the last.



How are we to understand the Confederate battle flag waved by a demonstrator from Texas outside the White House last week? Some shutdown supporters, fearing media blowback, tried to suggest it was the work of a liberal agent provocateur, or simply a symbol of rebellious high spirits and “Southern heritage.” But the meaning of that particular flag, outside the home of our first black president, in the middle of a conflict loaded with not-so-hidden racial messaging, is not difficult to grasp. It strikes me as evidence that the heavy historical weight of slavery, and what Jimmy Carter has called the “burden of white supremacy,” has not yet been lifted. We ignore it, or agree to overlook it, at our peril.


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In that light, I think Steve McQueen’s riveting film “12 Years a Slave” is one of the most important works of mainstream cinema to reach wide release in recent years. Based on the true story of Solomon Northup (played by the Afro-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free-born African American from upstate New York who was abducted and sold into slavery in 1841, “12 Years a Slave” was made by a black director and a black writer (the novelist and screenwriter John Ridley), with a black star. But it also reaches us under the aegis of Hollywood’s biggest male star, Brad Pitt (who produced the film and plays a crucial supporting role). Its subject is the complex weave of America’s racial history, which has never been a straightforward or simple dichotomy, and its intended audience is all Americans and indeed the whole world. It is not a movie about “white guilt,” whatever that would even mean in the 21st century. I not only had slave-owning ancestors, but am descended on my mother’s side from a family in the French port city of Nantes who owned slave-trading ships, which might be even worse. I do not remotely feel responsible for their crimes; the only historical obligation those long-ago rich assholes have conferred on me is not to avoid the truth.



Speaking of avoiding the truth, I can see you coming, Confederate apologists. Robert E. Lee’s letter is sometimes employed as indirect evidence that the Civil War was not really fought over the issue of slavery, but of course it demonstrates no such thing and anyway in 2013 that dog just won’t hunt anymore. Despite more than a century of whitewashing and euphemizing about “states’ rights” and the “Southern way of life,” it’s perfectly clear how white Southerners saw the conflict at the time. And a great many of them did not agree with Lee.



As Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens put it in his Cornerstone Speech of March 21, 1861, the brand new constitution of his brand new breakaway republic “has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions – African slavery as it exists among us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” The anxiety felt about slavery by Thomas Jefferson and other conscience-stricken slave-owning founders, Stephens went on, had been misguided. Such men had believed “that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested on the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error … Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”



Ideology aside, Stephens (who was played by Jackie Earle Haley in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”) had the reputation in rural Georgia of being a benevolent slave master. During his years as a lawyer, he once successfully defended an enslaved woman charged with attempted murder, and after the Civil War ended (and Stephens returned from imprisonment in Boston) many of his emancipated slaves reportedly remained on his plantation as hired hands. Of course we can’t now ask any of those people why they stayed. The post-war situation in the South was extremely chaotic, and a job with one’s former master was in some cases preferable to no job at all. It’s also important to remember that all the historical accounts of that era, including the narratives of former slaves, have been filtered through a white perspective tinged with unconscious or semi-conscious apologetics.



But let’s assume, for the purpose of argument, that Stephens was a kind and decent person in his private life, who also became the public spokesman for the virulently racist official ideology of the Confederate States of America and the author of the one text that neo-Confederates would most like to sweep under the historical carpet. If that’s the case, he becomes a perfect example of the toxic effects of America’s “peculiar institution,” exactly the issue explored in “12 Years a Slave.” That same poisonous influence drove the anti-slavery Lee to lead the South’s armies into a war that would kill more than a million people (about 3 percent of the U.S. population, or the equivalent of 9 million today).



It’s the same poison that we see corrupting both the benevolent and well-intentioned Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the depraved and brutal Epps (Michael Fassbender), the principal slave-owners depicted in McQueen’s film. They are wealthy men of property and privilege who believe themselves to be free, but with respect to the institution of slavery they are not free to resist it or control it. Indeed, it controls them, as in the scene when Ford tells Solomon that he “cannot hear” the latter’s protestations that he is in fact a free man from the North. While the slave-owners do not suffer the physical pain and psychic degradation that the persons who are their human property do, they also are shackled to an evil economic power. Ford is the kind-hearted capitalist, the reformer who seeks to ameliorate and humanize the inherent contradictions of his business. Epps is the capricious tyrant who embraces the sadistic logic of slavery to the fullest, an unforgettable Deep South antihero closely akin to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz.



I want to get back to Robert E. Lee in a moment, because there’s a sense in which he saw all this happening. But first we can note that “12 Years a Slave,” like Steve McQueen’s two previous films, is a formally rigorous work that is about more than its apparent narrative or official subject matter. McQueen was a prominent British visual artist before he turned to cinema with the extraordinary “Hunger” in 2008, in which Fassbender played IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Then came “Shame,” in which Fassbender played a contemporary New Yorker, surrounded by bland and sterile corporate spaces, who is hopelessly addicted to anonymous sex and pornography. Along with displaying Fassbender’s much-admired physique, these three movies on apparently unrelated topics all concern the human body as a form of economic and political capital, as the ultimate and universal commodity in Anglo-American commercial society. Slavery is an extreme example, but far from the only one. (I think the anomalous character played by Alfre Woodard, the black wife of a white slave-owner – a rare but not unknown phenomenon – sends the signal that even in the slave economy power sometimes trumped skin color.)



After Lee told President Pierce that slavery was an undoubted evil, he went on to say that he thought it was “a greater evil to the white than to the colored race.” It’s a revealing comment from one of the most thoughtful figures of the antebellum white South, but also one that rests on a number of racist assumptions. Lee believed that “the blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially,” an argument you can hear from Confederate apologists to this day. (I expect to hear it in the comments section not long after this article is published.) Still more insidious is the unspoken assertion that white society is civilized, cultured and sensitive in a way black people are not, and therefore white morality or the white psyche is more subject to damage from the despotic relations between master and slave. Lee was nominally against slavery, but he would deliver up immense bloodshed in its name, and here he reflects the views of slavery’s ardent supporters: The finer achievements of civilization depended on a “mudsill” caste of unpaid and uneducated laborers who did the heavy lifting so others could write poetry.



I don’t think you can look at the millions of Africans brought across the ocean in chains, the physical, mental and spiritual degradation endured by their descendants during three centuries of chattel slavery, and the terror and humiliation of a further 100 years of Jim Crow white supremacy after that, and conclude that white people suffered more from slavery. You can’t see what Solomon Northup becomes — what he does to himself and to others — in order to survive 12 years of slavery and conclude that Epps and Ford have it worse. Lee’s cultural blindness sounds uncomfortably close to that of the German officers who wrote home about how painful it was for their men to kill Jewish children. But all the same, the future Confederate war hero – who stands in granite replica, collecting pigeon poop, in the central squares of dozens or hundreds of Southern towns to this day – was onto something.



White people in America have been distorted and damaged by the legacy of slavery and by the “burden of white supremacy,” which Jimmy Carter was optimistic enough to believe had been lifted from his generation by the civil-rights movement. We are not responsible for the crimes of our ancestors, and only a handful of white Americans living today have roots in the era of slavery. But the supposedly dead white-supremacist ideology of the past has been dumped on us regardless; it has made the politics of white America paranoid, irrational and inbred, and created a white culture of grasping, fearful backlash rather than hope.



How do we explain the fact that most working-class whites support a political party that is implacably opposed to their economic interests, that seeks only to impoverish them and make them work harder for less? How do we explain the dead-end political battle against a moderate health-care reform package that was essentially invented by Mitt Romney? How do we explain that Confederate battle flag outside the White House? The politics of the Tea Party and the shutdown, the politics of a demented minority that has held the United States government hostage for the last month, is the politics of racial nihilism, the unfinished business of the Civil War, the undead ghost of a poisonous ideology that corrupted everyone and everything it ever touched. If the end of “12 Years a Slave” lacks that cathartic feeling of Hollywood deliverance, it’s probably because Solomon Northup goes home to New York realizing that he had never really been free and never would be. The same could be said of all of us.

Tea Party Yankees

by Seth Ackerman

Today’s Republican extremism owes more to the Constitution that established the Union than the secessionists who sundered it. It’s Hoover’s party — and Madison’s — not Calhoun’s



In the past few weeks – really, the past few years – a cottage industry has grown up on liberal websites and op-ed pages, in Facebook memes and political magazines, trying to make historical sense of the country’s spiraling rightward extremism.



Understandably, people are hungry for facts and ideas that can explain the current insanity. What you might call the magazine-reading class is feeling disoriented, I think. Like most of us, they live in a day-to-day world that seems, if anything, hyper-depoliticized: a world of Starbucks and smart phones and reality TV, in which expressions of political militancy are almost never heard. Crashing into this postindustrial idyll comes a national crisis engineered by wild-eyed insurgents quoting eighteenth-century philosophers. It seems to come out of nowhere.



The other day I got into an argument (yes, it was on the internet) about an article belonging to this cottage industry – though this particular article was a relatively sophisticated product. The piece, by the New Republic’s John Judis, along with this 2011 prequel he wrote during the last debt ceiling crisis, offers a historical explanation of how U.S. politics got to the point where the current government shutdown –“one of the worst crises in American history,” according to the headline – has become possible.



Judis is a thoughtful political writer with a contrarian streak that leaves him resistant to some of the more egregious mythologies one often sees in such articles. He’s better informed than others about the historical facts, and much of what he says is true, or at least based on the truth.



But like much of the liberal pop-history genre it belongs to, Judis’s New Republic analysis seems governed by two overarching reflexes: (1) an insistence on seeing this crisis, not as structural, but as a product of the wicked recklessness of Republican extremists; and (2) a desire to attribute it to the influence of some alien force, from some other place, one that is archaic and unlike our own. For Judis, that place is an imagined neo-Confederate South.



In either case, the danger comes from outside – from some place exterior to the familiar, modern, consensual United States we all thought we lived in. I disagree. As I see things, the reality is much less comforting.





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For Judis, the current crisis has two “precedents.” First, and most improbably, is “the South of John Calhoun” (who died in 1850) and his nullification doctrine, according to which states could disobey federal laws they deemed unconstitutional.



Less far-fetched is a second precedent, to which Judis devotes most of his attention: the emergence in the late 1930s of a conservative coalition, embracing Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress, who opposed the New Deal’s advance.



Judis believes today’s Tea Party-inflected Republican Party is a reincarnation of the old conservative coalition; that the latter “anticipates the composition of today’s Republican coalition and its grievance: the expansion of the federal safety net.” So he offers a historical narrative of how that bygone formation emerged, how it operated, and what explains its alleged reappearance in recent decades.



He starts with the coalition’s Northern component, and describes it well. It was made up of “‘Old Guard’ conservative Republicans from rural and small-town districts in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the Prairies,” who “took their cues from small businesses back home in their districts and from business associations like the National Association of Manufacturers.” Although he doesn’t quite make this explicit, these “Old Guard” Republicans very much represented the dominant tendency in their party. Their free-enterprise politics were those of Calvin Coolidge; their revulsion at the New Deal differed little from Herbert Hoover’s.



But Judis doesn’t really dwell much on the coalition’s Republican side. He’s far more interested in the Southern Democrats. If the Northerners come off in his account as somewhat musty relics, with their hysterical claims about the New Deal’s “march toward a totalitarian state” based on “principles and doctrines from Karl Marx,” the Southerners can be depicted as positively antediluvian. Or, more to the point, antebellum.



The Southern Democrats of the 1930s and 1940s were “heirs to John Calhoun and the Confederacy,” Judis writes, who, “following the lead of their antebellum ancestors,” “framed their opposition to the New Deal as a principled defense of the Constitution.” The truth, as he (correctly) explains, is that when Southern legislators opposed liberal policies in the 1930s, they usually did so to protect the region’s racial caste system and the backward and exploitative system of labor-intensive agriculture it underpinned.



Judis’s historical argument – and he’s not alone in making something like it – goes like this: Although the conservative coalition managed to stall the New Deal’s advance in the late 1930s, it “faded temporarily from view” after 1945. This was due to a “spirit of national unification” induced by the national government’s wartime call on all its citizens to pull together and sacrifice. That spirit of unity “lasted for 15 years after the war,” and it “helped to give rise – although not without conflict – to a social compact between business and labor, an end to racial segregation and the preservation and expansion of New Deal programs like social security.”



But beginning in the Sixties, that consensus started to unravel. “The Democratic Party began to come apart over Jim Crow in the 1960s, and Barry Goldwater seized the opportunity to attract white Southern Democrats by taking up the mantle of states’ rights.” The result was a rolling realignment that brought the South gradually into the Republican Party, culminating in the 1994 elections, which finally destroyed much of the region’s remaining Democratic contingent.



For Judis, then, “the conservative coalition of the 1930s was the Republican Party of today.” Only today it’s far more potent, for it now forms an organically unified party. When it was only a cross-party formation, the alliance had been an uneasy one. But once united within a party after 1994, it “lost the inhibitions that had previously prevented it from trying to destroy its Democratic opposition and to dismantle the New Deal itself.” The result is today’s out-of-control extremism.





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Judis gets many of the details right. But the weaknesses in his argument are fatal. The first wobbly point is his notion that a wartime “spirit of unification” caused the conservative coalition to “fade from view” until the Sixties. Those who were around in the 1950s would have vigorously disagreed. For example, an August 1960 article in the New York Times magazine, headlined “Again That Roadblock In Congress,” highlighted how “a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats has made the Committee on Rules virtually a third branch of Congress.”



But more importantly, after 1945 the extremism of the conservatives’ rhetoric and tactics didn’t fade away either.



Certainly not in 1946, when the Republicans triumphantly recaptured Congress after a bitter red-baiting campaign. That election installed new House leaders, all of whom, according to the historian Robert J. Donovan, had “risen to power chanting the same refrain over and over again. Its lines – in no particular order – were:



Arrogant individualism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt … un-American … unconstitutional dictatorship … NRA … AAA … lavish spending … socialistic experiments … New Deal spoilers and wasters … never known the necessity of meeting a payroll… New Deal pump-primers … planned economy … remain the citadels of liberty … America is in peril … Valley Forge.



Nor had it faded by 1952, near the height of Red Scare hysteria, when the national Republican platform charged that the Democratic administration and its leaders “work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism,” and had “so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence.”



So faithful to the spirit of national unity was Robert Taft that as Joe McCarthy turned the political system upside down with fantastic allegations of high treason, the Senate Republican leader had advised him to “keep talking, and if one case doesn’t work out, proceed with another.” That year saw the re-election to the Senate of a whole generation of reactionary Old Guard Republicans, including not only McCarthy himself, but William Jenner of Indiana, George Malone of Nevada, Arthur Watkins of Utah, Edward Martin of Pennsylvania, John Bricker of Ohio – as well as a newcomer to the Senate, Barry Goldwater of Arizona.



The reality is that whatever moderation did emerge in the postwar Republican Party was brought about not by some ethereal “spirit of national unification,” but by hard electoral facts. In 1958, the Republican Right and its far-right business allies overreached, making the fateful mistake – against the advice of more sober-minded party technicians – of putting right-to-work measures on the ballot in six mostly industrial states, including Ohio, California, and Washington. The flood of union members turning out to defend organized labor, combined with the effects of the short but sharp recession earlier that year, triggered a Democratic landslide nationwide – “The Midterm Revolution” – that decimated the Old Guard. When it was over, Martin, Jenner, Malone, Bricker, and Watkins were gone.



That election represented a decisive step in a process that had been gradually underway in the industrial states for the past twenty years: the slow displacement, mostly by attrition, of the Northeastern GOP’s once-dominant hardline Coolidge-Taft current, as the growth of a heavily unionized working class rendered such revanchist conservative politics increasingly incapable of clinching statewide majorities. New York, once a cradle of reactionary Republicanism, was probably the first state to undergo this shift, beginning in the 1930s. The result was a crop of “liberal” (in fact, usually moderate) Republicans like Thomas Dewey and, later, Nelson Rockefeller.



But the force was irresistible elsewhere, too. The ascendancy of Republicans like George Romney of Michigan, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, James Rhodes of Ohio, and Charles Percy of Illinois reflected their respective state parties’ need to marginalize the hard-right politics of their rural areas and small towns – not because of any postwar “spirit of unity,” but because in some of these states probably more than half of all households now contained union members, and urban black populations were growing. These states had reached electoral tipping points that seemed to leave the GOP with no other option than at least a tacit acceptance of the New Deal status quo.





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If Judis’s treatment of the Republican Right is flawed, his account of the coalition’s other half is totally specious. The notion that Southern Democrats in Congress during the middle third of the century were progenitors of ideological Tea Party-style anti-government extremism cannot withstand a glance at their actual voting records.



In the 1930s and afterwards, Southern members almost unanimously insisted on shielding the South’s social system, based on labor-surplus agriculture and formalized racial hierarchy, from any federal policies that might erode it. But once those guarantees were granted, usually through quiet negotiations in committee or within the Democratic leadership, those legislators openly and overwhelmingly supported the New Deal.



It should be remembered that when FDR was elected, the South was a desperately poor, single-crop farm region with a per capita income roughly half the national average and a third the level of the Northeast. Its political culture was still tinged by the memory of the violently suppressed Populist insurgency of the 1890s. Its elites were reactionary, and only bloody turn-of-the-century disenfranchisement campaigns had spared them from total defeat.



But even with a restricted franchise, there was simply no mass electoral base in the South for the kind of free-enterprise fundamentalism that could thrive in historically prosperous northern regions like rural upstate New York or small-town central Ohio. In a study of 150 key New Deal-era roll calls held between 1933 and 1950, Ira Katznelson and two co-authors classified the votes according to their policy areas: labor, civil rights, welfare state programs, fiscal policy, economic planning, and business regulation. In all areas except labor and civil rights, Southern Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favor of New Deal liberalism, while in all areas except civil rights, Republicans voted overwhelmingly against it.



A majority of Southerners voted to establish Social Security, regulate utilities, expand work relief, and even, before 1938, to pass labor legislation like the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage.







Or we can look at the ideology scores of Northern and Southern House members, using the well-known data compiled by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Their data set, which takes into account all roll calls in every Congress, distills each legislator’s voting into scores on two dimensions, which together can predict on average 85% of votes. The first dimension score, which carries the bulk of predictive power, reflects conventional notions of contention over the “role of government in the economy.” The second dimension score is a racial-sectional one whose predictive power was greatest during controversies over Reconstruction in the nineteenth century and civil rights in the twentieth.



As you’d expect, Southerners were always far to the right of Northerners on the second dimension. But as the graph below shows, the average Southern member’s score on the first dimension was consistently more “liberal” than the average Northern member’s through 1958, and remained roughly even with the North through 1964.







In fact, all of Lyndon Johnson’s major War on Poverty programs were enacted with a majority of Southerners voting for final passage. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act – the omnibus bill establishing Job Corps, a federal work-study program, adult education funding, and various other things – was sponsored in the House by staunch anti-labor segregationist Phil Landrum of Georgia, and passed with 60% of Southern Democrats voting in favor, even as 87% of Republicans opposed it. Likewise, Medicare passed in 1965 with 61% of Southern Democrats in favor and 93% of Republicans opposed. The 1964 Food Stamp Act, after an intra-party log-rolling deal involving farm subsidies, went through on virtually a straight party-line vote.



There were certainly hard-right Southern Democratic legislators who refused to vote for such policies. There were also surprisingly liberal ones; the region’s Congressional delegations were more ideologically diverse than is usually assumed.



If there was one legislator who best embodied the classic image of a conservative Southern Democrat in Congress, it was probably Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. An uncompromising (if “genteel”) segregationist and signer of the Southern Manifesto, Russell, according to a political scientist writing in 1950, belonged to a class of Southern legislators which “speaks for the respectable conservatives, speaks for chambers of commerce, civic clubs, banks, corporations.” Russell was probably a bit to the right of the median Southerner in Congress. But it is a mark of how different that time and place were that Russell declared the proudest accomplishment of his forty-year Congressional career to be the National School Lunch Act, which he spearheaded in 1946 and then doggedly defended over the years whenever its funding was challenged: “No one,” he charged, “should seek to deny a poor child in a poor state a lunch at school because both child and state are less able to pay than a wealthier child in a wealthy state.”



The notion that this brand of Southern Democratic politics prefigured modern-day Rush Limbaugh-style Tea Party Republicanism is fallacious. If, today, there are modern-day equivalents of Russell’s genre of Southern Democrat – on issues other than civil rights – they are not Eric Cantor or Ted Cruz, but rather Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, John Breaux, or Claire McCaskill. In other words, the closest modern-day equivalents of the conservative Democrats of the 1940s are modern-day conservative Democrats.



As for the process by which those traditional Southern Democrats were eventually displaced by an ever-expanding Southern Republican Party – a process Judis attributes to Goldwater and his fellow conservatives “seiz[ing] the mantle of states’ rights” – it was a gradual, uneven, and complex one. What is notable, though, is that over the long run it represented a process of convergence with the rest of the country – not a retreat into some moonlight-and-magnolias particularism. And for good reason: during those decades, the South’s social structure was converging with the North’s at a stunning pace. Once a poor, rural and agricultural backwater, the South emerged as a suburban, postindustrial growth region. In almost every aspect of its society – including its new forms of racial stratification – it increasingly resembled the North. And the same was true of its politics.



The South’s 1964 protest vote against Lyndon Johnson was undoubtedly a result of the Civil Rights Act. But over the next decades, as the Republican Party advanced through a rapidly modernizing South, it was the white-collar, affluent, and suburban districts – i.e. those that were the most “modern”, “American,” and populated with northern transplants – that led the way toward GOP dominance, while those that were most traditionally “Southern” lagged behind. Likewise, the old post-Civil War pattern of poorer whites being more likely to vote Republican, which survived well into the 1950s, sharply reversed, so that by the end of the Reagan era the South had joined the national pattern of “normal” class voting alignments.



The civil rights revolution and its backlash were historic shocks to an ossified Southern political system; they created openings for Republicans in places where openings might not have existed otherwise. But by the mid-1970s, the “racial issues” that were helping many Republicans win election in the South were rarely any longer regionally distinctive issues like states’ rights or equal voting, especially outside the Deep South. They were usually the same racial issues that were helping Republicans win election in the North. In their appeals to white voters, Southern Republicans would find great advantage in hammering away at racially coded issues like crime, welfare, busing, and affirmative action. But in this they were no different than their fellow Republicans in the suburbs of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.



Today, except perhaps for the deepest Deep South states – and remember, Deep South whites make up no more than 5% of the nation’s population – voting patterns don’t differ all that much by region, once voters’ other characteristics are taken into account. In fact, nowadays the single best predictor of a state’s level of Republican voting among whites seems to be religion. By this measure, whites in most Southern states vote more or less the way you would expect them to:







Nor is this fact itself exceptional. In nearly every rich democracy – even those that are most secular – religious voters of any given class are much more likely to support conservative parties.





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So where does that leave Judis’s thesis? If all he meant to say was that today’s Republican Party is like the old interregional conservative coalition in that (a) it’s conservative, and (b) it’s interregional, his argument would be trivial.



But he seems to be saying more than that. By spinning a fable in which a mid-century “spirit of national unification” and the forward-looking consensus it allegedly created accounts for all that is good and progressive, while all that is evil can be traced to the “heirs to John Calhoun and the Confederacy” and the backward-looking coalition they led, his argument calls to mind the admonition of historians Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino in their introduction to The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism:



The notion of the exceptional South has served as a myth, one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history. Although scholars and journalists have repeatedly chronicled the decline of regional distinctiveness for more than a century now, the basic features of southern exceptionalism still structure the popular mythology of American exceptionalism—a story of white racial innocence (occasionally compromised by the “southernization” of northern race relations), of a benevolent superpower (that temporarily tasted the “southern experience” of defeat after Vietnam), of an essentially liberal national project (if only the red states would stop preventing the blue states from resurrecting the Great Society).



Judis sees a historically progressive national project derailed by a particularist South’s rebellion against the civil rights consensus. I see something different. I see, among other things, a reactionary national consensus over a backward set of fundamental governing structures – and it is these structures that are most immediately to blame for the present crisis.



The United States has the least competitive elections in the rich world; the lowest participation by voters; the most infrequent turnover in its legislature. For a century and a half two entrenched parties have periodically manipulated election rules to exclude competitors with the blessing of the courts, in ways that would probably draw formal sanction by E.U. monitors if it were happening in Kazakhstan.



In the jargon of mainstream political science, citizens have preferences, and the political system aggregates those preferences according to its particular rules and structures. Undoubtedly, Americans’ political attitudes have shifted to the right in many ways over the past few decades. Still, if the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff represent a “shocking” crisis, a “breakdown” in the norms of governance, maybe the problem lies less with bad people and their bad preferences (and where do those come from?) than with the distortions of the system that aggregates them.



Tea Party Republicans, for example, turn out to be no more numerous in the South than in the rest of the country – at least judging by reliable sources like the National Election Study or the Pew Research Center’s political typology analysis. But there are far fewer liberal and secular voters there. As a result, the degree of competitiveness of House elections in the region is even lower than the scandalously depressed levels prevailing in the rest of the country – which themselves stand somewhere between North Korean levels and those of a functioning democracy. And that is due to the U.S. regime of restricted party choice.



The average member of the House “Suicide Caucus” (half of which is southern, compared to 30% of the overall House) won his or her last election by a margin of 32 percentage points. Nationwide the average House member won by a 31 point margin. For the average Republican winner the margin was 29%. By comparison, in the last UK election the average parliamentary victor won with a total vote of 47%.



But the problem runs deeper than the mere mechanics of elections. When voters do bother to vote, even on the rare occasions their vote matters, the results are rendered opaque and irrelevant – a proliferation of veto points, a miasma of dispersed authority – by a constitutional structure meticulously designed to suppress any visible connection between the casting of a ballot and the enactment of a program.



However disastrous or ridiculous the outcome of this crisis ultimately proves to be, the sub-democratic structure of American politics will guarantee that the consequences will be non-existent for those who initiated it: the regime of repressed competition will ensure no consequences for the individual legislators, while its separation of powers will probably ensure no consequences for their party either.



In the last debt ceiling crisis, two years ago, the public expressed overwhelming revulsion and blamed the GOP by a wide margin; the next year, Republicans won the House again, and ended up with three-fifths of the governors and state legislatures. Most likely the same or worse will happen again in 2014.



After two centuries laboring under a Constitution crafted by principled opponents of democracy, who saw as one of their central goals the suppression of any chance that concerted majorities might ever use the state for positive ends, how can anyone be surprised that this country is hospitable to anti-government extremists?



In Judis’s history, the villains of the piece, the reactionary ogres of the conservative coalition, North and South, who stymied all progress at every turn, never tired of extolling the greatness and genius of the United States Constitution.



What did they know that liberals don’t?

What Will Happen Now? (2)

The Republicans caved completely and the debt limit was raised and the goverment shutdown lifted.  All is quiet for the moment, yet this Republican obstructionism will not end.  It will go on and on.  Either the Republican extremists will die or the country will die.

Rep. Charles Rangel Compares Tea Party in House to 'Confederates'

15 October 2013

 

Washington (CNN) - Rep. Charles Rangel on Tuesday compared what he considers the most intransigent members of the House Republican caucus with the Confederates of the American Civil War.

 

The last-minute holdups on a deal over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, the longtime Democrat from New York City told CNN's Ashleigh Banfield, are not coming from conflict between Republicans and Democrats.

Rather, "this is all about a handful of people who got elected as Republicans that want to bring down our government. You can see it in the streets. You can see where they're coming from," Rangel said.

"The same way they fought as Confederates, they want to bring down the government and reform it."

Rangel was asked to confirm that he was referring to the Confederates of the Civil War. He told Banfield, "If you take a look at the states that they control, take a look at the Dixiecrats, see how they went over the Republican Party…"

To that Banfield pointed out that Michelle Bachmann, a major voice against Obamacare, is not a Dixiecrat but a Republican from Minnesota.