Historian David Greenberg over at Slate wonders if Barack Obama is "just another high-toned liberal doomed to failure?" Excerpt:
No one would deny the admirable side of the Mugwump inheritance: the policies it helped to implement, the idealism it represents, the commitment to principles like clean campaigning and good government that lie at its core. Yet the failures of Stevenson and his heirs pose a warning as well to those like Obama who would adopt this ideology, rhetoric, and style. For it was no coincidence that Stevenson and others failed as campaigners; his failure was rooted in his attitude toward politics. In 1952 and again in 1956, Stevenson tried to avoid negative campaigning at first, considering it undignified and an insult to voters. (He felt the same way about TV ads.) And so when he finally, of necessity, resorted to attacking Eisenhower—mainly by going after his running mate, Richard Nixon—Stevenson came off as desperate and hypocritical. The same was true for Tsongas and Bradley when they flailed haplessly at Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Today, Barack Obama finds himself in a similar bind to those men. If he continues to heed the advice of friendly pundits to attack Hillary Clinton more forcefully, he risks undermining the very premise of his campaign, tainting his image as a new kind of politician while failing to land his punches, because in the end he's not really a street fighter. What he doesn't seem to understand—as Stevenson did not—is that democratic politics fairly demands a measure of thrust and parry, of appeals to self-interest, and of playing the political game. And so does being a good president.
Be sure to read the whole thing. Speaking of Adlai Stevenson, I've been reading (off and on when time permits) Arthur Schlesinger Jr's Journals, a collection of some 6,000 pages of diary entries from 1952 to 2000 edited by his two sons into an 894-page book. Schlesinger worked as a speech writer for Stevenson's two campaign runs in 1952 and 1956 before joining with the John Kennedy campaign. It's very interesting to view politics from a diarists view, rather than Schlesinger's nuanced historical monographs. He has this ability to pick apart campaigns like an anthropologist that is something to behold. Certainly, being a participant in the very politics he wrote about in books on Andrew Jackson or Franklin Roosevelt improved his scholarship. Finally, on the subject of books, check out the Kindle, Amazon.com's new "electronic-paper" reading device. Is that cool or what?
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