AND AN AUTHOR TO MATCH THE TIMES :

Idiot Time (Alan Wolfe, 07.09.02, New Republic)

As Lord Bryce noted in 1888 in The American Commonwealth, the American way of choosing presidents rarely produces politicians of quality. Subsequent events vindicated his point: in the half-century after his book appeared, Americans elected to the presidency such undistinguished men as William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. An era that included two wars, the assumption of an empire, a stock market crash, and the beginning of our greatest economic crisis was also marked by as mediocre a political leadership as we have had in our history.

Two features stand out in this roll call of incompetence: the presidents with the lowest reputations over the past hundred or so years were all Republicans, and they were all guided by the conviction that their job was to side with the powerful in any potential conflict with the poor.

There's a nearly sublime shallowness to Mr. Wolfe's sentiment here. McKinley, Taft and Coolidge are, after all, at the very worst considered to have been mediocrities. Harding's administration was a tad corrupt, but he didn't really do anything that was detrimental to the country. Hoover is a legitimate target, but not for the reasons Mr. Wolfe probably thinks. Folks like Mr. Wolfe and the editors at the New Republic, those intellectuals who have helped to shape the historic standing of all these men, presumably think that Hoover should have cranked up the New Deal immediately and thereby ended the Great Depression earlier. The problem with that is it's pretty much what he did. Hoover was an Atari Democrat before his time, an engineer who thought plying the right levers of government would cure most ills. As David Kennedy wrote in his terrific history of the Period, Freedom from Fear : The United States, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States, Vol 9)(1999) (David M. Kennedy), Hoover began the explosive rise of the Social Welfare state well before FDR ever took office, with similarly disappointing results.

That, of course, is another problem for Mr. Wolfe's analysis. The New Deal, as Mr. Kennedy also showed, was an expensive flop. It was only the coming of WWII that finally pulled the American economy out of the Depression, not all the wasteful spending and ill-conceived government programs that Hoover and FDR larded America with. So by any objective measure, FDR deserves the same judgment in at least his first two terms as Hoover gets for his one. We'll not quarrel here with FDR's subsequent handling of WWII, we'll assume he deserves full credit for our partial victory. But the failure to prepare for and prosecute war with the Soviet Union is a major black mark, leading as it did to the fifty year Cold War. And, of course, the low moments of FDR's career, and two of the worst in American history, came with his decisions to break the precedent set by George Washington and seek a third term and then the monumentally irresponsible fourth term, even though he was dying and had paid no attention to the choice of a Vice President. All in all, we'll give him a mixed rating, but with the bad predominating.

Not so fortunate are three other Democrats who likewise expanded government ("sided with the poor") and who unfortunately all combined that with pursuit of wars that they failed to win : Wilson (WWI), Truman (Korea), and LBJ (Vietnam). Only yeoman-like work by liberal historians has served to refurbish the reputations of these three who were roundly despised by the time they left the White House, two of them even forced to retire rather than seek another term after being humiliated in the NH primary.

Finally, on our list of great presidential failures, we'd have to give the absolute lowest mark to Richard M. Nixon, who Mr. Wolfe must be gratified to note is a Republican, but who he likely left out of his calculations because Mr. Nixon was too a big government liberal. Many are disturbed on first hearing that accusation, but Tom Wicker amply proved it in One of Us : Richard Nixon and the American Dream.

All of which leads us to the somewhat startling realization that Mr. Wolfe has history almost completely backwards. The strongest correlation between a failed presidency and the politics of the executive seems to be not with support of big business--a policy which several great successes, including Ike, Reagan, and Clinton, all followed--but with support of big government at home, in the form of high spending and taxes, and abroad, in the form of war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2002 7:31 PM