By Conrad Black
Thursday, December 24, 2015
As this will be my last offering here until the Iowa
caucuses are almost upon us, I will try to cobble together some election
predictions. The Republicans should win. Since the big Republican series of
victories through and after the Civil War, ending in Cleveland’s first election
in 1884, a party has won three consecutive presidential elections only when the
incumbent was very popular at the end of the second term or when there were
unusual encumbrances to a change. Theodore Roosevelt won a third Republican
term in 1904, but was a very popular incumbent, having had almost a full term after
the assassination of McKinley. Herbert Hoover won a third Republican term in
1928, but the incumbent Coolidge was popular and the opponent, Alfred E. Smith,
was the first Roman Catholic major-party presidential nominee, a controversial
issue in those times, and was an anti-Prohibitionist from the Bowery with a
shiny nose, a heavy New York accent, and loud suits.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke a tradition as old as the
Republic in taking a third term in 1940, but he was the all-time heavyweight
political champion of the country in the midst of an extreme international
crisis at the most critical point in World War II. President Eisenhower was
very popular, and we will never know whether his vice president, Richard Nixon,
or John F. Kennedy really won in 1960, but officially, Kennedy did. Nixon was
back after the two Kennedy-Johnson terms in 1968, and the Democrats were back
after the two Nixon-Ford terms in 1976. Jimmy Carter had the doubtful
distinction of having the only single term for his party since Benjamin
Harrison (1889–93), Ronald Reagan was extremely popular and pulled George H. W.
Bush in behind him for a third Republican term, but Bush’s party was splintered
by Ross Perot and he became only the third elected president defeated seeking
re-election in 80 years (after Hoover and Carter). Bill Clinton’s two terms
were followed by the Republicans (though, as with 1960, we will never know who
really won the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore). Again, the
Democrats were back with Obama after two terms and their two terms are up next
year.
Obama is not popular, so the Republicans have a clear
starting advantage. The patterns of these elections have naturally evolved over
the history of the Democratic–Republican rivalry. The Democrats won 13 of the
15 elections between 1800 and 1856, with the Jefferson-Jackson formula of
protecting slavery for the South but selling themselves in the North as
uniquely capable of keeping the South in the Union. The opposition Whigs,
despite such eminent leaders as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham
Lincoln, could win only with heroes of small wars, Generals William H. Harrison
in 1840 (against Van Buren, over the depression produced by Jackson’s
revocation of the charter of the Bank of the United States), and Zachary Taylor
in 1848 (when Van Buren, out of sour grapes at not being nominated, ran as a
third-party candidate and threw the election from General Lewis Cass to Taylor).
Once the Republicans fought and won the Civil War, they won 14 of 18 elections
from 1860 to 1928. They stretched out the fading pieties of the Civil War by
steadily expanding the ambit of veterans’ benefits, but the solidly resentful
Democratic South and the huge numbers of arriving immigrants between the Civil
War and World War I who rallied to the big-city Democratic machines made the
elections very close.
The Democrats won the popular vote in four of the five
elections from 1876 to 1892, and lost in 1880 by only 9,000 votes out of 9
million cast, but the Republicans won three of the five elections. In 1896, the
Democrats were seduced by the 36-year-old populist spellbinder, William
Jennings Bryan, with the false panacea of bimetallism. The Republicans won four
straight elections (three against Bryan himself), but when Theodore Roosevelt
fell out with his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, they fumbled the White
House to the former president of Princeton University and the governor of New
Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. Again, the Democrats had two terms, but the Republicans
were back as isolationist, Prohibitionist, good-time Charlies for the Roaring
Twenties with Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The Great Depression brought the
heavens down on the Republicans, and the Democrats won seven of the next nine
elections, four by FDR, and interrupted only by a
Washington-Jackson-Grant–level war hero — Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and
1956. The Roosevelt coalition included the solid South; the African Americans
of the North (they couldn’t vote in the South), because they participated
equally in his workfare programs; the urban working class; most of those who
thought of themselves as religious or ethnic minorities, including 70 percent
of Roman Catholics and Jews; and most of the intelligentsia, academia, the
entertainment industry, and the working press.
Vietnam and the race riots sundered the great Democratic
coalition and brought in the Republicans, who won seven of the next ten
elections, cresting with Ronald Reagan’s great economic boom and the very
satisfactory and almost bloodless end of the Cold War. Bill Clinton exploited
George H. W. Bush’s political awkwardness (he never won a stand-alone election
above a safe congressional seat before succeeding Reagan) and ran as an
anti-pacifist, budget-balancing “New” Democrat who hired 100,000 more policemen
for the country. George W. Bush upheld the two-term-per-party norm on the way
into and out of office. He started well in responding to the 9/11 terror
attacks, but did nothing as the housing bubble and current-account deficits
reached unsustainable proportions and responded to the severe economic crisis
of 2008 with the ungalvanizing tocsin “The sucker could go down.” Barack Obama
took the Clintons’ party away from them although Hillary Clinton won the
overall popular vote in the primaries, and the Democrats, and then the country,
went for the implicit formula that all the guilt and shame of slavery and
segregation could be expiated and washed away by putting an African American in
the White House. That act was certainly a great alleviation of concerns about
the tolerant spirit of the majority of Americans, but he has been an
unsuccessful president, as was his predecessor, and this is only the second
time in American history that there have been three consecutive two-term
presidents. (The other was Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, 1801–25.)
Hillary Clinton is the obvious nominee against Bernie
Sanders, a camp resurrection of George McGovern in policy terms, an almost
endearingly absurd Vermont socialist. But Clinton will defy the rule against a
third term for an incumbent president with a negative approval rating only if
the Republicans run an unfeasible candidate. She will not separate herself so
easily from the Obama record, having been its not particularly accomplished
secretary of state. She made an obsequious speech to the world’s Muslims as
part of the Obama pretense that terrorism had been almost been stamped out, and
described Bashar Assad of Syria as a “reformer” before his country blew up and
he gassed his own people. She probably committed illegalities with official
e-mails, and is almost compulsively untruthful, from claiming to have been
named after Sir Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Mount Everest (four years after
she was christened) to blaming her fabricated recollection of having dodged
sniper fire in Bosnia on “jet-lag.” If she tries to put much distance between
herself and Obama, she will inspire the Obama loyalists to sit on their hands,
and if she runs on the basis of any kind of continuity with this slapstick
farce of an administration, she will sink without trace. Nor should anyone
imagine that this debt-sodden economy is going to be a great Democratic
re-election launch-pad.
She has never won a seriously close election and while
she is obviously an intelligent woman, would not be so relaxed about the
endless humiliations America has endured under Obama and Kerry as they are, and
would presumably try to do something half-plausible with the Republicans about
the national debt that Obama has doubled in eight years, her campaign has been
unexciting, accident-prone, and not sharpened by serious competition, such as
she provided for Obama eight years ago. Except for Hubert Humphrey, who ran
against Richard Nixon in 1968, since FDR’s time and the rise of radio and
news-film and more so with all the subsequent advances in the media, the
election is always won by whoever is more popular personally. By this
criterion, Mrs. Clinton would have a chance against Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and
possibly Chris Christie; and would probably lose to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
These would seem to be the only Republicans who now have a chance for the
nomination, and they are a far cry from the procession of Bachmann, Perry,
Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, and others who in 2012 briefly challenged Romney, a
consultant who had faced in all four directions on every major issue.
For what it is worth, I think Cruz will win in Iowa, and
Trump will win in New Hampshire. But then the race will narrow sharply and if
Trump does not become more specific and more acceptable to the large group of
moderates who find him offensive (but are about as irritated as I am by
attempts to portray him as a Nazi), he will then start to slide, and I think
that Rubio will win over Trump, Bush, and Cruz in Florida and ease in ahead,
even if the candidates who have won earlier contests before, such as Bush and
Cruz, have to deliver him blocs of delegates to put him across over Trump.
As most of Trump’s views, apart from a couple of areas of
immigration and law enforcement, are quite moderate, there is plenty of room to
adopt much of his platform on behalf of a largely united party. Trump would
receive considerable deference, and the level of his support entitles him to
it; he will not do anything that would assist Hillary back into the White House
and the idea that he would spend a billion dollars of his own money to win the
Ross Perot Prize as a useful idiot for the Clintons was a figment of the
febrile and wishful imaginations of CNN and the New York Times. The choice of
the vice-presidential candidates could influence the election outcome for the
first time since, of all people, Spiro Agnew (in 1968, to cut into the George
Wallace vote), if not Lyndon Johnson (1960). The Bush-Clinton era has had its
moments, but after the disasters of the last 20 years, I think the country
wants a change, and if the Republicans nominate a worthy heir to the wide
vote-attracting talents of Eisenhower, Reagan, and, at his best, Nixon, and not
the foot-in-mouth disease of some of the blunderbuss candidates interspersed
around and after them, it should be their year again.
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