Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Fearmongering is as old as the union
From the RoundTable blog
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John Freivalds
Freivalds runs an international communications firm in Lexington.
When John McCain said that Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization, would welcome Barack Obama's election as president, he was using the fear-of-foreigners election-year ploy that has been a staple of American politics since we started having elections.
The first person to use it was John Adams, the Federalist (the conservative party of its era) candidate for president against Thomas Jefferson, the Republican (then the liberal party) candidate. He began a dubious tradition that has been perfected by lots of presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and of course, George W. Bush in 2004. Perhaps the French say it best if you remember your high school French: Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose. (That's where the famous phrase the more things change the more they stay the same comes from.)
Speaking of the French, they were the enemy of the month in America's first presidential election in 1800. All of this was laid out in a fascinating new book, "A Magnificent Catastrophe." The French had just had a real revolution and the fear among the landed wealthy class was it might be brought to America, along with the guillotine. The book describes a Federalist pamphlet of the campaign that said, "If Jefferson is elected and the French lovers get into authority, those morals which protect our lives from the assassin, which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence, defend our property from plunder and devaluation and shield our religion from contempt and profanation will be trampled on and exploded."
The pamphlet goes on to say if America followed France, it would enter into the moral and political abyss where people turned "more ferocious than savages, more bloody than tigers."
Republican orator Abraham Bishop countered that these attacks that "exaggerated the threat of danger from France justified a costly military buildup and repressive domestic policies, high taxes burdening working Americans; a privileged class benefiting from government programs." Luckily, reason prevailed and Jefferson won the election.
We have had lots of foreign nemeses dragged out since 1800, but let's fast forward to 1948. Lyndon Johnson wanted to be senator from Texas and decided to run against a popular conservative nice guy and good ol' boy, Coke Stevenson. LBJ's biographer, Robert Carp, wrote that Johnson raises the art of "negative campaigning complete with scientific polling, the use of advertising and the use of electronic media to push whatever issue."
Johnson in his campaign against Stevenson kept trying to find an issue that would get the electorate going. He discovered that people were concerned about Russians and communism. So how to exploit that against the popular Stevenson? Caro points out in his biography "Ascent to Power" that some sort of anti-communist rally was going to be held. Johnson went to it and Stevenson didn't. There were lots of anti-communist rallies in those days. Yet because Stevenson didn't attend that one rally, Johnson branded him as "pro-communist" and that, along with some ballot stuffing, got him elected.
Caro writes, "Once Johnson found an issue true or untrue that touched the voters, he hammered it home until people started to believe it. No one could destroy a reputation better. LBJ did what he had to do; everything absolutely everything ... his morality was the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified." Sound like anyone you know today?
LBJ really started modern negative politics. Richard Nixon got elected to Congress the same year by beating up on Red Chinese. (He, of course, later got credit for "opening" up China). And then we have had Bush brow beat us to believe in 2004 that if we lost our vigilance and allowed people to keep their shoes on going through security at airports, al-Qaida would have us replace hamburgers on our summer grills with shish kabobs.
And what criticism do we have of the French these days? Well, we can't pronounce their verbs, Paris is too expensive, and we are jealous that they get six weeks paid vacation to our two.
