McCain's 'Old Hickory' impersonation
A famously bitter election 180 years ago illuminates much of the present race and the persistence of the mythology of the backwoods Westerner riding in to smite the elitists. Obama better watch how this narrative is playing out.
Twenty thousand guests mobbed the White House. The President was roughed up and forced to flee from the adoring rowdies. "Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses, and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe," according to eyewitness Margaret Smith, describing President Andrew Jackson's 1829 Inaugural reception in a letter to a friend.
This 180-year-old scene might well be relived this January, if Westerners John McCain and Sarah Palin gain the White House. Imagine newly-sworn-in VP Sarah Palin descending to the White House lawn in a helicopter mounted with a wolf-scope rifle. Picture Sen. McCain pulled through the front gates in a Clydesdale-driven cart, with wife Cindy tossing Bud Lites to celebratory GOP faithful. Conjure Barack Obama retreating for a private vacation to Hawaii in George Clooney's Gulfstream, trying to piece together why things went wrong.
The presidential campaign of 1828 — featuring a rematch between President John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson — bears such a strange resemblance to today's contest for the presidency that it might contain clues of the eventual outcome.
For starters, the previous presidential election was hotly disputed after the initial vote of the Electoral College failed to produce a winner. As with 2000, the candidate who won the popular vote, Jackson, ultimately lost the election, which he felt had been stolen from him. General Andrew Jackson was a famous war hero, distinguishing himself in the War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars. A Western senator, he had been a prisoner of war. Questions were raised about his age and fitness for the high office, as he never fully recovered from a duel that left a bullet lodged near his heart.
By contrast, Adams was the son of a president, although he was not labeled "Adams 6" by the press. He was raised overseas, as his father served as an envoy in Europe after his presidency. He was a Harvard graduate, class of 1788. His party had lost control of Congress two years before the 1828 election.
Generally, the campaign was framed as the newcomer Westerner against the polished aristocrat. Using the popular media of the time, incumbent Adams took the low road in the press, charging Jackson with both bigamy and adultery. Jackson retaliated with similar vitriol. Some historians speculate that the charges of adultery hastened the death of Jackson's beloved wife, Rachel, who died before the inauguration.
Perhaps we can take some tiny dose of comfort from the fact that today's tawdry campaign is not the most vulgar in American history. Yet the story line of the contest can be instructive, especially to the strategists running Barack Obama's campaign.
First, Jackson won because the mythology of a Westerner raised in the Territory of Tennessee with a prolific war record was vastly appealing to Americans who wanted change. Adams, educated abroad and fluent in three languages, was painted as the candidate of privilege and the educated class. The popular mob at Jackson's inauguration was viewed with horror by America's merchant and upper classes, who probably thought the end of the world as they knew it had begun with the election of Old Hickory. In fact, the world did not end, and President Jackson served two enormously consequential terms in office.
Second, the actual policy differences between Adams and Jackson were fairly narrow. Both favored western expansion and high tariffs to protected domestic industry. Yet Jackson managed to portray himself as the candidate of change and emphasized his personal history. When opponents insulted Old Hickory by calling him a "Jackass," Jackson deftly adopted the symbol of the stubborn mule, which later became the Democratic Party's mascot.
The lessons here are manifold. By picking a far-western governor for his running mate, Arizonan McCain has masterfully attempted to recast this election in the Andrew Jackson mold, with John and Sarah as the out-of-power mavericks riding into corrupt Washington to clean up the town, despite his 26-year tenure in Congress. Sen. Obama's own life story, his multicultural upbringing and progress as a self-made man — far more compelling and authentic in many respects — has faded to the background, as the swarms of reporters rush to Wasilla to investigate Gov. Palin's brief career and enthrall us with tales of her hunting wolves and celebrating the Alaskan "First Dude's" love of snowmobiling.
It's not too late for Obama to recapture the imagination of the American people and the network and cable TV story-tellers. He has strong advantages in unfiltered media such as direct Web marketing and viral video distribution of his message. In many ways, his "home court advantage" lies in untested modes of communication that aren't marked by pundits or measured by polling.
For Obama, the gnawing question must be whether the quality of his character can shine through in a hard-fought battle that is increasingly dominated by political mythology and slimy personal attacks. The rich pages of our history clearly have much to tell us about the idiosyncrasies of the American character and what we value most in the selection of a president.
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Comments:
Posted Sat, Sep 27, 4:40 a.m. inappropriate
Silly, superficial, inaccurate reading of history: Jackson was our nation's first and greatest populist president for reasons totally unrelated to the trivialities that Alben mentions here.
Jackson was every bit as experienced politically as Adams was. He was, and remains, the only president in our history who had served in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, and as a governor (military governor of Florida) before running for the White House.
Jackson is the only president in our history to pay off the national debt. Could we use some of that today, maybe?
Jackson was, and is, the only president in our nation's history who warned, specifically, that the unchecked concentration of wealth in the hands of the financial elites was a threat to national security. McCain is owned lock, stock, and barrel by those financial elites.
Jackson's policies put him into diametric opposition with the Adams-Clay-Webster faction, the remnant of the Hamiltonians. The differences between them were far more substantive and thoroughgoing than is suggested here.
Jackson wanted access to credit spread across the population as a whole, not controlled by bankers in Philadelphia (this is pre-Wall street). Jackson would have cracked down hard on the type of derivatives trading and default credit swaps that led to today's financial crisis, before they ever became a problem. He would, in short, have put them out of business. McCain has called for less, and not more, regulation on the guys whom Jackson contemptuously referred to as "stock-jobbers."
Jackson is arguably the nation's first great grass-roots political organizer. He supervised the birth and the growth of the Democratic party. He had local Democratic organizations started in all states, cities, and towns. McCain, who has seven houses (his rich wife's), has servants who deal with his grass roots. Jackson's newspaper editors provided talking points for his party workers, and his machine politicians delivered the "spoils" and oiled the wheels of the political machine with barrels of whiskey. After watching McCain in action last night, I could tap me some of that whiskey. But I digress.
Jackson opposed expansion of slavery into the territories, even though he was a slaveowner who never freed Slave One. He said, rightly, that it was a threat to the cohesiveness of the Union. McCain is a typical cheap-labor conservative. Jackson's snuffing of the "Nullifiers" had the effect of stamping out an incipient right-wing coup. It is preposterous to assume that McCain would do any such thing. The right wing is his base. Jackson, on the other hand, considered conservatives traitors and conservatism, by its nature, as inimical to what America stood for.
We could use a president like Jackson today. He was anything but in the pocket of big money, like McCain is, and was quite the opposite. To compare McCain with Jackson on any level, except that both of them were old when they ran, is ludicrous in the extreme.
Jackson is one of the four greatest and most influential presidents in our history, along with Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. McCain is a pissant by comparison.
Posted Sat, Sep 27, 3:43 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Silly, superficial, inaccurate reading of history: I won't speak to Ivan's comments but only to the superficial and (look at the polls) untrue assertion that the choice of Palin was in any way "masterful."
It was a sign of McCain's weakeess, irresponsibility and unfitness for office.