By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 3.25.04 @ 12:05AM
So what really explains the rancor arising in this election year?
WASHINGTON -- I do not know what you thought when you heard that
Senator John François Kerry was overheard in a scrum of
Chicago blue-collar workers referring to unnamed politicians as
"crooked" and "lying." I thought he was referring to the Clintons.
What is more, I thought he was being complimentary.
The Clintons have, indeed, been very artful in all their
transgressions. Even when they get caught they wriggle out of it,
save for the time that Bill got impeached and found in contempt of
court and lost his license to practice law. Actually Bill has never
really practiced law. He taught law briefly, but mostly he breaks
the law. Hillary has been even more artful in breaking the law,
though she too has suffered blemishes on her otherwise exemplary
record of crookedness and lying. You might recall that the last
Independent Counsel to ponder her 1990s appearances under oath
deposited in his final report the finding that Hillary's sworn
testimony was "factually inaccurate." Yes, "factually inaccurate,"
but she is a senator today even as Teddy Kennedy is a senator, and
Robert Torricelli was a senator.
The current wisdom swirling around Campaign 2004 is that it is
going to be very bitter. Both sides, the pundits tell us, are going
to indulge in "negative" ads and eye gouging. The explanation for
this incendiary turn of events is that the Democrats believe our
debonair president stole the 2000 election. There has to be more to
it than that. Republicans believed that the 1960 presidential
election was stolen from them and by an equally debonair aspirant.
The 1964 election did not turn out to be a particularly "bitter"
election -- though I am sure surviving Goldwaterites are still hurt
that the Lyndon Johnson accused his opponent, Barry Goldwater, of
plotting to get us into war in Southeast Asia.
So what really explains the rancor arising in this election
year? Why is it that the Democrats cannot get over their hurt
feelings about the final tally in the Sunshine State? My
explanation is counseled by the historic record. The two branches
of the most political generation of the twentieth century, the
1960s generation, are now in the fullness of middle age. They were
on opposite sides of the barricades in 1968 and so they are today
-- though the barricades have been replaced by party lines. John
François Kerry, the Clintons, Dr. Howard Dean and other
leading Democrats were Coat and Tie Radicals in 1968, radicals
adhering to a leftist agenda while favoring the ambiguity of a coat
and tie to preserve what Bill Clinton famously called "political
viability." In 1968, George W. Bush and many of his cabinet members
were Penny-Loafer Conservatives. They wanted nothing to do with
protests and communes.
Immediately after the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, during
which 1960s themes resonated, the contemporary wisdom held that
1960s youth culture was radical. Actually it was split. In 1972 the
youth vote went against the radical George McGovern and for
President Nixon. Support for the Vietnam War endured almost to the
end. While protesting youth such as Kerry and the Clintons were
smiled upon by the media despite the social pathologies that
attended their lifestyle, for instance drugs and sexually
transmitted diseases, the young conservatives developed their own
distinctive point of view.
Today's enthusiasm for free markets, globalism, strong defense,
and some semblance of traditional values is championed by those of
us who opposed the radicals of the 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s
while we were reading Milton Friedman and the Founding Fathers,
many members of today's leadership in the Democratic Party were
reading Saul Alinsky, Paul Goodman, and condensations of Marx and
Engels. The mentors of their radical youth are all
passé, but there is no evidence that the Clintons
and Kerry's have learned that in their youth they were wrong and we
were right.
Thus Kerry has brought up Vietnam all over again, glossing over
the truly brutal protest he engaged in as a leader of the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War. He even has the chutzpah to remonstrate
against the FBI's surveillance of him in those days, ignoring his
group's many acts of civil disobedience (occasionally criminal
disobedience) in time of war. Hillary Clinton, in what she termed a
"major policy" speech at the Mayflower Hotel unveiled a vision of
the Nanny State that was vintage 1968. The battle lines of the
1960s are still in place.
The issues, for the most part, remain. Kerry and the Clintons
are the critics of American power and proponents of social
engineering and radical reforms. Bush is the defender of American
national interests and traditional values. The 2004 election will
be fought by two branches of a historic generation hoping to claim
the identity of that generation for themselves and the federal
government for their own very different public policies. My
candidate is the old Penny Loafer Conservative, George W. Bush, and
frankly I find it amusing that when I was reading Friedman back in
the late 1960s he apparently was reading Esquire's Handbook for
Hosts. We conservatives have always been a very diverse
group.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Law, Founding Fathers, Iran, NATO
