Bryan, William Jennings

There is more science in the twenty-fourth verse of the first chapter of Genesis…than in all Darwin wrote.

- In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 94.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

…We have no assurance that any physical perfection can be made use of in the world above…neither have we any assurance that the perfections of the mind survive the day of death.

- In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 160.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

By a vote of 60-40 early this morning in the Senate, the Democrats, with not a Republican vote, voted to cede power to the Republicans in 2010.  The Democrats thought they were voting to invoke cloture on the ObamaCare bill, but the consequences of the passage of this bill, assuming that it passes the House, will likely be to transform a bad year for the Democrats next year into an epoch shaping defeat.  As Jay Cost brilliantly notes here at RealClearPolitics:

“Make no mistake. This bill is so unpopular because it has all the characteristics that most Americans find so noxious about Washington.

It stinks of politics. Why is there such a rush to pass this bill now? It’s because the President of the United States recognizes that it is hurting his numbers, and he wants it off the agenda. It might not be ready to be passed. In fact, it’s obviously not ready! Yet that doesn’t matter. The President wants this out of the way by his State of the Union Address. This is nakedly self-interested political calculation by the President – nothing more and nothing less.

What makes this all the more perversely political is that the bill’s benefits do not kick in for years. Why? Politics again! Democrats wish to claim that the bill reduces the deficit, so they collect ten years worth of revenue but only pay five years worth of benefits.

The Congress and the President are rushing to wait – not because that’s best for health care, but best for the political careers of Washington Democrats.

It stinks of influence peddlers. Reviewing winners and losers in the Senate health care bill shows clearly that it was written with the full advice and consent of privileged interest groups. Here are some of the most amazing provisions, courtesy of the AP:

-Nebraska, Louisiana, Vermont and Massachusetts. These states are getting more federal help with Medicaid than other states. In the case of Nebraska — represented by Sen. Ben Nelson, who’s providing the critical 60th vote for the legislation to pass — the federal government is picking up 100 percent of the tab of a planned expansion of the program, in perpetuity.

-Beneficiaries of Medicare Advantage plans — the private managed-care plans within Medicare — in Florida. Hundreds of thousands of them will have their benefits grandfathered in thanks to a provision tailored by Sen. Bill Nelson.

-Longshoremen. They were added to the list of workers in high-risk professions who are shielded from the full impact of a proposed new tax on high-value insurance plans.

Big corporations get nice paydays, too. Private insurance industries get the public option eliminated. Meanwhile, PhRMA made sure that there would be no significant prescription drug re-importation provision in the bill. Byron Dorgan said the FDA might have put the kibosh on it because of pressure from the White House.

Yet when it comes to big, wet kisses for entrenched interests, you can’t beat the individual mandate. People will soon have to buy health insurance from private companies, or else face a tax penalty from Uncle Sam. Democrats who think they can come back later to fix this perverse result are kidding themselves. The insurance lobby is already so powerful that Democrats couldn’t get the public option through now – what makes them think they’ll be able to later, after they’ve given insurers 30 million additional customers, and required every last American to do business with them? The insurance companies are going to be to the 21st century what Standard Oil was to the 19th.”

Cost goes on to see the reaction to this bill as part of a “Jacksonian moment”, mimicking the election of 1828 and other elections since, when public disgust with Washington has resulted in dramatic defeats for the party in power:

“We might be on the verge of another Jacksonian moment: a time when the people awake from their slumber, angrily exercise their sovereign authority, and mercilessly fire the leaders who have for too long catered to the elites rather than average people. The first time this happened was in 1828 – when the people rallied to the cause of Old Hickory to avenge the “Corrupt Bargain” of four years prior. It’s happened several times throughout the centuries. Most relevant to today, it happened time and again in the 1880s and 1890s, as the people hired then fired one Republican and Democratic majority after another in search of leaders who could attend to the people’s interests instead of the special interests. That age saw the birth of the Populist Party. It was a time when so many felt so disgruntled by the political process that young William Jennings Bryan – just thirty-six years old and with only two terms in the House – came within a hundred thousand votes of the presidency.

I wonder if we’ve returned to that kind of dynamic. In true Jacksonian fashion, the country fired the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 because they bungled the war in Iraq and allowed the economy to sink into recession. They might soon have another Jacksonian moment, and fire these equally useless Democrats for hampering the recovery, exploding the deficit, and playing politics with health care. “

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, this is all looking very familiar to Old Hickory.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level” yesterday, according to Fox News. Reid compared Republican opponents of the monstrosity known as “health care reform” to abolition, racial integration, and women’s suffrage opponents:

“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ’slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these excuses before, you’re right,” Reid said Monday. “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ’slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough.’”

He continued: “When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn’t quite right.

“When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”

There are many angles from which to attack Reid’s outlandish remarks. Republicans could, for example, point out that Democrats have consistently gone ape every time abortion has been compared to the Holocaust or President Obama has been compared to Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Now their Senate Majority Leader is turning around and comparing Republicans to those who opposed abolition, racial integration, and women’s suffrage.

Republicans could also point out that we were told the historic election of a black president meant that we were moving toward a post-racial America. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Democratic Party have increasingly exploited America’s racial divisions and sought to portray their political opponents as racists.

But I think the best way to approach this is to point out the obvious, as the Fox News reporters have and as Michelle Malkin (among others) has. The obvious is that Sen. Reid was right: There were those who opposed abolition, racial integration, and women’s suffrage. And they were Democrats. Yes, the best way to approach Sen. Reid’s idiocy is to give him — and the rest of the country — a refresher lesson in American history and the history of the Democratic Party.

Much more beneath the fold…

Let’s rewind to 1856 and the election of James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States and the last Democrat to hold the office before the outbreak of the Civil War. Maybe Sen. Reid has forgotten that James Buchanan ardently defended the right to own human beings as slaves, and maybe he has forgotten how Democratic President James Buchanan responded to secession:

Following the election of 1860, seven deep South states left the Union, and Buchanan was presented with the final crisis of his administration. In his message to Congress in early December 1860, issued prior to secession, Buchanan showed his sympathy for the South by blaming the sectional crisis on the North’s interference with slavery. He urged northern states to repeal their laws which hampered the return of fugitive slaves. . . .

Once secession began, Buchanan sought to retain the loyalty of the upper South and to avoid a confrontation with the departed states until they found their way back to the Union. He hoped that Congress or the Peace Convention, which assembled in Washington in February 1861, would find a solution to the crisis. He also recommended that a constitutional convention be held to pass amendments protecting slavery in the territories and in slaveholding states. However, nothing came of these compromise efforts.

All emphasis is mine. To briefly recap: When southern states threatened to secede from the Union, Democratic President James Buchanan blamed the northern states for causing the sectional divides and urged those states to make it easier for fugitive slaves to be returned to their masters. It was Democratic President James Buchanan who proposed constitutional amendments to reaffirm the institution of slavery, not only in the southern states but in the territories. It was Democratic President James Buchanan whose sympathy for the south and relative inaction after secession led to the Civil War.

And who led the Union to victory against the secessionist south, while finally securing the abolition of slavery? Oh, that’s right, it was Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States and the first Republican president. Maybe Sen. Reid remembers him from his grade school history lessons.

Fast forward to 1870. The Massachusetts Republican State Convention seated two suffragettes as delegates that year. Two years later, the Republican National Convention expressed openness to women’s suffrage, and in 1878 Republican Sen. A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment, which would eventually extend suffrage to women. In 1892 women were seated as alternate delegates and a woman spoke before the Republican National Convention both for the first time. The first woman elected to Congress was Montana Republican Jeanette Rankin in 1916. The first woman appointed to the Supreme Court was Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Of course, we know that the 19th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1920. Why? Well, it might surprise Sen. Reid to learn that Democrats in the Senate that he now leads defeated the 19th Amendment not once, but four times. Despite being introduced in 1878, the 19th Amendment didn’t pass the Senate until some 41 years later when Republicans had regained complete control of Congress.

But maybe Democratic President Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, said it best when he wrote in the April 1905 edition of Ladies’ Home Journal:

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.

We could go on. We could discuss William Jennings Bryan, who is well known for starting the Democratic Party on its march toward socialism but who is lesser known for blocking the Democratic National Convention from adopting a resolution opposing the Ku Klux Klan in 1924. We could point out that the Democratic Party did nothing to reverse its historic opposition to liberty and justice for African Americans until Franklin D. Roosevelt realized they could be politically useful.

We could also point out that the man who tried to use the filibuster to block civil rights was Strom Thurmond, originally a Democrat. We could even point out that while the Democratic Party boasts about electing the first black president, it is quiet about placing a former Klansman — West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd — third in line for the presidency by electing him the president pro tempore of the Senate.

We could point out so much more, but we’ve already made our point. The point is that while Harry Reid may want to lump his political opponents in with the worst figures of American history, the truth is that it was his own party — the Democratic Party — that resisted abolition, resisted racial integration, and resisted women’s suffrage. But we shouldn’t be angry that the Senate Majority Leader has slandered us. We should thank Sen. Reid for giving us the opportunity to give the American people a history lesson on slavery, segregation, sexism, those in the Democratic Party who supported those evils, and those in the Republican Party who resisted them.

Cross-posted to RedState.

Bryan, William Jennings

The preacher should be the boldest of men because of the unselfish character of his work.  – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 261.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

…Self—the most popular of all the false gods…  - In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 75.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin signed a book outside Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids on Wednesday evening.

A dangerous divide has been developing for some years in America, between those who are comfortable negotiating the wide array of knowledge and information sources now available, and those who are not. It is in many aspects a class divide, one side characterized by wealth, professional degrees, security and complacency, the other by shrinking incomes and high credit card debt, anxiety about the future, and anger at those in power.

One U.S. Senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, recently called this America’s greatest present danger, more potent than our international entanglements, the financial crisis, health care, energy or environment. The “tea party” protests over health care and immigration policy are one manifestation of that divide. Another, related, is the current response to Sarah Palin.

Palin has become the champion of a new wave of populism. People attracted to her are outraged over federal bailouts for Wall Street bankers, resentful of benefits accorded illegal immigrants, incensed over the notion of federally funded abortions, and perhaps most disturbing, suspicious of education. A fairly consistent analysis of the Palin phenomenon concludes that she is the happy beneficiary of this protest coalition, having happened into her celebrity role by the accident of timing, a willing but passive instrument. But her willing embrace of the role of symbolic embodiment of protest makes her as much a generator as recipient of it.

Populist protest is nothing new in America. Andrew Jackson quite deliberately created the first wave of popular anger at elite power in our political history and rode it successfully into the presidency before the Civil War. Later, William Jennings Bryan captured the wrath of farmers and small merchants displaced and disadvantaged by emerging industrialism at the end of the nineteenth century, running as the standard-bearer of both the Democrat and Peoples’ Parties. But industrialization had benefited too many people, and the reforms he advanced seemed too threatening to a majority of the electorate. Franklin Roosevelt organized populist anxiety over the future of the American economy into an electoral coalition that carried him through four successful elections, and saved capitalism in the offing. The civil rights movement of the 1960s proved too potent for John Kennedy to ignore, hard though he tried initially, and by embracing it he became one of its heroes.

These are populist success stories, even Bryan’s, for much of the reform the Peoples’ Party advocated was realized in the Progressive Era. But populist protest has succeeded only when it has offered a positive program and enjoyed effective leadership. Without these, it has faltered and dissipated. It seems unlikely that Palin, having abdicated as governor, will be able to provide operative direction for the current movement.

While the present tea party unrest follows somewhat this long populist tradition, it is unusual in at least one respect: distrust of education.

Though in her book Palin explains that her college journey was interrupted frequently because she had to work to earn her tuition, at other times she has disparaged education. Her poor showing in the Katie Couric interview and her manifest disinterest in the details of governance suggest someone for whom information is not important. In the election campaign and on her book tour Palin has represented herself as ordinary, a person whose values come from the cultural experience of hard-working, Christian common folk who regard more than rudimentary schooling as unnecessary. There is more than a hint of anti-intellectualism in her message and her demeanor. Impatience with critical analysis and appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities of reality is characteristic of many of the faithful attracted to her rallies and book-signings.

Throughout American history education has been understood as a pathway to economic advance, responsible citizenship and human fulfillment. But that assumption is subject to considerable challenge today. Yet it is still true that high school and college completion leads to higher lifetime earning. And the disadvantaged sense the truth that their powerlessness corresponds to their failure to understand government and other power structures. Thus, as Palin’s populism encourages anti-intellectualism, it represents a significant disservice to the very people she purports to champion. It’s a disservice that’s a danger for them, and for American society.

Steve Haycox
Anchorage Daily News

“Thanksgiving Day is a jewel, to set in the hearts of honest men; but be careful that you do not take the day, and leave out the gratitude.” -E.P. Powell

“The unthankful heart… discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!” -Henry Ward Beecher

The thing I'm most thankful for right now is elastic waistbands. ~Author Unknown

There is one day that is ours.  There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to.  Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.  ~O. Henry

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare.  They are consumed in twelve minutes.  Half-times take twelve minutes.  This is not coincidence.  ~Erma Bombeck

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  ~Thornton Wilder

On Thanksgiving Day we acknowledge our dependence.  ~William Jennings Bryan

Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now.  ~A.W. Tozer

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel.  ~Author Unknown

Sarah Palin vs. Pit Bull

At last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the , he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

Frank Rich
The New York Times

Bryan, William Jennings

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in God? – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 118.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

A sequel to the praiseworthy primer, “Palin the Post-Partisan Populist Pals around with Pundits.”

It’s always entertaining to watch Ivy-educated well-connected authors pontificate on the need for common people to tear down Ivy-educated well-connected authors, but Matthew Continetti’s defense of a “new populism” strains even the relaxed standard of credibility applied to such antics. Setting aside factual problems — most Americans still favor healthcare reform, especially with a public option, and stripping power from insurance companies is a profoundly anti-elitist move — the central conceit of the argument, that Sarah Palin stands in unbroken succession with populist luminaries like Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, is simply a bridge too far.

The first, the last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West.

The analysis goes awry at the outset. Jackson and Bryan were not just populists, but masters of the art, heirs to a tradition begun in Rome and perfected in America. Classicists will recall Cincinnatus — the farmer-turned-dictator who saved the Republic and, upon completion of his duties, promptly returned to his farm to till his land, spurning the lifetime of fame and fortune that could’ve been his. Like Washington, Jackson and Bryan both drew substantially (if unknowingly) from the Cincinnatus myth. They were brilliant men who could skillfully navigate the halls of power, but chose not to. Visitors to Jackson’s Hermitage (Continetti and I agree, it’s well worth the trip) are treated to a full picture of a deeply intellectual man who, despite partially embracing his opponents’ portrayal of him as an illiterate backwoodsman, maintained a vast library, read and re-read Plutarch, and decorated his home with maps of the growing American Republic. This was a complex man — not a “commoner,” not an “elite,” but something uniquely American. Despite his unfortunate embrace of creationism (and… uh… racism), Bryan was much the same: he maintained the sensibilities of the common man, but advocated for them by taking up the weapons and vestments of the elites.

William Jennings Bryan.

Continetti is right to praise these men, as exemplars of a substantially forgotten American political tradition — the expert statesman who does it because he has to, and never forgets the roots of democracy. However, Continetti misses the mark by putting Palin in their company. Palin, he argues, is their natural successor, misunderstood and maligned by the elites as an uneducated backwater hick. Fine. But there the similarities end. Jackson and Bryan were successful for their ability to walk both worlds — like Cincinattus, they could deploy the knowledge, expertise, and rigorous methodology of the educated elites, but through the perspective of, and to the exclusive service of, the common man. Palin, however, lacks the intellect that transformed Jackson and Bryan into paragons, and Continetti’s “intuitive faith in builders and traders, in hockey moms and plumbers,” is inadequate to supply the deficit, because it is meaningless. What could it possibly mean?

The Palin myth breaks down here, because ultimately, the stereotypes of the contemptible elite and the virtuous but “simple” small town dweller must be unsatisfying. Few elites are actually evil and subversive; and, more importantly, few small-towners are “simple.” The vast majority of Americans, regardless of domicile, are intelligent, profoundly interested men and women, committed to themselves and their country. Only aspirant demagogues like Sarah Palin actually (and gleefully) live the stereotype of the willfully ignorant backwoodsmen. Accordingly, when Palin claims to speak for and embody small town America, we should be offended by the implied insult. The average American, whether she lives in the city or the suburbs, is closer to a Jackson than a Palin, and thank God for that.

Somewhere along the line we decided to sever the parts of the Cincinnatus myth that lies at the heart of American populism: today we call someone a populist for simply identifying with the common man, and to hell with the vigorous competence and record of service that marked the populist movement’s first and finest avatars. To equate a lack of achievements and an utter disinterest in ever attaining distinction with the notion of the American “common man” demeans us all, and dupes us into selecting leaders based on their ability to act, rather than their ability to lead. We deserve better, we are better, and that, ultimately, is why Sarah Palin must fail.

Bryan, William Jennings

Love of money is probably more responsible for modern wars than any other one cause…the blood of many being shed to enrich a few. – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 233.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

A short postscript added 12-November-2009

Laura Carlsen, in today’s Americas: MexicoBlog writes on the Honduras “agreement”:

What will surely go down in the books as one of the worst diplomatic agreements ever, was hammered out by the State Department team—[Thomas] Shannon, joined by Obama advisor Dan Restrepo and the man who has now been sent in to try to clean up the mess, Craig Kelly. It was signed by the two parties on Oct. 29.

I thought from the beginning that by forcing the legitimate government of Honduras to “negotiate” with the gangsters who seized the presidency was dishonest from the start — but given that the United States was going to impose its will on Honduras (as it always has); that a Wilsonian-style Democratic Party administration is in power (interested in domestic reforms,  multi-laterialist in foreign policy, but with the assumption of imposing U.S. values and solutions on the rest of the planet); AND that the present Secretary of State (like Wilson’s William Jennings Bryan) was selected as a sop to a defeated inter-party rival, despite having little or no real foreign policy experience (and despised by Latin American policy-makers) — a “negotiation” of some kind was inevitable.

While the coup has had the benefit of uniting Hondurans who are in favor of change into a coherent movement, at worst, a successful negotiated settlement would create a “coalition government ” (of reformers and gangsters) which might delay change, but would avoid an abrupt, violent reaction.

And, one is tempted to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt, given that Thomas Shannon was a Bush administration holdover.

Shannon, however, may have had no intention of acting as an honest broker (as if one honesty brokers with crooks):

Tom Shannon met with Republican Senator Jim DeMint on Oct. 20 and DeMint urged him to recognize the Honduran elections without the reinstatement of Zelaya. DeMint offered to release his holds on Shannon’s nomination to the ambassadorship of Brazil and the nomination of Arturo Valenzuela to fill Shannon’s shoes as Asst. Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

DeMint, who traveled to Honduras to meet with the coup regime last month, had blocked these two key State Department nominations ostensibly in protest of the administration’s policies to reinstate Zelaya.

White reports that there is every indication that Shannon had already formulated this critical change in policy to abandon the demand for reinstatement when he flew down to Tegucigalpa on Oct. 28, and that coup leader Roberto Micheletti knew this. That left only President Zelaya and the rest of the world in the dark as to the real goal of the negotiations.

No… that left people like Elisabeth Malkin – a good Latin American reporter unfortunately employed by the same newspaper that believed the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” — in the dark:

Under fire from allies in Latin America and on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration moved Tuesday to try to salvage the American-brokered agreement that had been billed as paving the way for a peaceful end to the coup in Honduras. Instead, the accord seems to have provided the country’s de facto government with a way to stay in power until a presidential election scheduled for the end of this month.

Whether it was Shannon, Jim DeMint or Hillary Clinton, the effect is the same.  The United States has signaled to Latin America that United States policy remains as it always has been — to treat any reformist, no matter how mild or ineffectual (like Mel Zelaya) or change in the status quo, even when the impact on the Untied States is simply higher wages for Honduran workers (which might have raised the cost of underwear at your local Wal-mart by a penny or so) as something to be thwarted at all cost.  Including damaging the honor of the nation, and the reputation of its president.

POSTSCRIPT:

Magbana, on the situation, and the reputation of the Obama administration, writes (12-Nov-09) on Honduras Oye!:

I won’t repeat what I wrote in yesterday’s update, but a few more things are worth mentioning.  The biggest reason to believe that the US was behind the coup is that there is no way that the Honduran military, with the millions it receives from the US annually, is going to embark on a coup involving massive deployment of troops and the kidnapping of a head of state without explicit approval of the US.  Pure and simple, if the US did not want President Zelaya out, he would be at the presidential palace today and not a guest of the Brazilian embassy.

I guess there is an assumption that there is a difference between Democratic and Republican administrations and there may be in areas such as  social and economic programs.  But, when it comes to foreign affairs and Defense Department spending there is someone else in the driver’s seat and the car is definitely not parked at  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

…

But, even if I was unfamiliar with the situation in Honduras, I would know immediately that it was a US-backed coup  because of one thing:  the coup in Haiti.

Six weeks after the February 29, 2004 coup d’etat  in which the democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was kidnapped, I was in Port-au-Prince as part of a delegation to determine the US’ role in the coup and kidnapping of Aristide.  It is in Haiti that the US perfected the template for the  coup in Honduras with certain variations here and there.  I remember talking with people here in the States after I returned from Haiti  and it was only when I told them certain things did they begin to comprehend that the US was the force behind it all.  They were shocked at first because they could not believe that the US would be capable of such things.

And you wonder why I say Latin Americans have good reason to regard the Obama administration as more of the same old, same old as every other U.S. administration?

Bryan, William Jennings

War is not a private affair; it disturbs the commerce of the world obstructs the ocean’s highways and kills innocent bystanders.- In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 231.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

I challenge the doctrine, now being taught, that we must enter into a mad rivalry with the Old World in the building of battleships – the doctrine that the only way to preserve peace is to get ready for wars that ought never to come!  It is a barbarous, brutal, un-Christian – the doctrine of the darkness, not the doctrine of the dawn. – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 192.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

One can afford to be in a minority, but he cannot afford to be wrong. - In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 189.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)

Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

…The worship of the intellect—an idolatry as deadly to spiritual progress as the worship of images…- In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 127.

(19 March 1860, Salem, Illinois – 26 July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee)                           Married Mary Baird, 1884

Bryan, William Jennings

It is more important that you trust the Rock of Ages than that you know the age of the rocks. - In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 39.

Bryan, William Jennings

He [Christ] warned against investments…which would divert the affections from the great purpose of life.  – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 76.

Bryan, William Jennings

…Love is the weapon for which there is no shield. – In His Image (NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 158.

It was little more than one hundred years ago that William Jennings Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold speech at the Democratic convention in 1896.