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Attention Delegate LeMunyon
1 hour ago
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Reagan Fails GOP "Purity Test"
Hahahahahaha, I wonder if any Republican president passes the new RNC purity test? Maybe if you go back to Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover?
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11 comments:
damn my borwser's acting screwy... anyway...
"Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover"
it would help you if you read up a bit and learned these two guys were complete opposites - so much so that Coolidge made his thoughts on Hoover very public.
Coolidge was an old school 19th century classical liberal. Hoover, though not an exact comparrison, was more in line with the "progressive" mold of TR and Wilson that you so adore.
Did I ever say I "adore" Woodrow Wilson? If so, please send me the link because I must have misplaced it. Teddy Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a superb president, especially for a Republican. :) Interesting, I've never heard Herbert Hoover described as a "progressive" before, but I guess to today's Republicans, anything to the left of Joe the Plumber is considered an ultra liberal. Whatever.
well hoover wasn't the "progressive" like TR and Wilson (and i dont mean to say you have said you love wilson, but just love TR progressivism which Wilson is similar to), but in comparison Hoover is inappropriatly lumped together with Harding and Coolidge. And I'm not the only one who has made such claim... http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?r=1&ISBN=9780881337051&ourl=Herbert%2DHoover%2FJoan%2DHoff%2DWilson&cm_mmc=yahoossp-_-plp-_-books2-_-Herbert-Hoover-9780881337051
But it is a huge injustice and had more to do with the FDR years portraying Hoover as their opposite. When in reality, they had a lot in common. FDR aide Rexford Tugwell would later admit "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."
Compare Hoover's reaction to deep recession with that of Harding -- Following WWI, there was a deep recession. Harding responded like a classical liberal would, he had a massive across the board tax cut and balanced the budget, cutting federal expendatures in half. In contrast, Hoover sought to use government power to improve the eocnomy --he over doubled the income tax, trippled the size of the commerce department, placed implicit price controls on wages and set up a myriad of New Deal light programs designed to keep various prices up. Also the signer of that wonderfully imfamous trade protectionsm act.
Even before this, Hoover was also seen as the academic tinkerer when he was the commerce secretary and was not liked by the classical liberals in the Harding and Coolidge adminstration. In fact Hoover was such the big government interventionalist that FDR even campaigned against him calling him such (what irony).
If you read his inauguration speech, though it talks about free enterprise, he talked about national education, state supported healthcare, regulation of industry... all of these things were to the left of the political spectrum at the time. And if you read his acceptance speech from the 1932 republican convention, he lists his accomplishments and virtually all of them are some kind of "progressive messure" to regulate commerce, intervien with the depression or to promote the "common welfare" in services.
Hoover was no Coolidge.
Hoover as president was not the Hoover who was previously known for implementing governmental innovations; a little bit of historical revisionism there I believe.
While the New Deal did borrow from a number of ideas that Hoover had once advocated, as president he did not ever implement many of those ideas; he was too much a captive of the Republican Party philosophy of his day!
Tom's right -- Hoover was first and foremost and engineer, and as such was actually a dynamic force for large scale federal project (the only purse large enough to put such projects into action. Amusing, isn't it?) However, once he became president, he didn't have the confidence in his abilities to govern and became more of a tool for his advisors, all of whom had extreme conservative views.
The most obvious example is the burning of Hooverville and the WWI veteran Bonus Marchers in Washington DC. It may be the case that Hoover himself was looking only for a small clearance and McArthur took it upon himself to clear out the whole thing. Still, Hoover, even as President, felt unable to interfere or speak against his military advisers. One of my uncles, who saw plenty of horrific things in his life (he was at the Battle of the Bulge, and was J. Edgar Hoover's chauffer, for starters) was one of McArthur's foot soldiers for the Hooverville debacle. He was a teenager (he lied to get into the military at 16) and it was the only thing he would never talk about when I was growing up and was deeply ashamed of it until he died. He said it was too awful to retelling how the United States treating its own citizens (and its veterans) that way.
And I know it's a Republican meme, at least since the publication of Jonah Goldberg's book, to insist that liberals and progressive worship the ground that Woodrow Wilson walks on, but I've been in politics for twenty years, and I've never once heard any liberal or progressive speak highly of him. Perhaps if conservatives spent time actually talking with liberals and progressives they would know what we think, as opposed to insisting on telling us what we supposely think.
@ Lowell
"Did I ever say I "adore" Woodrow Wilson? If so, please send me the link because I must have misplaced it."
- Lowell Feld, 2009
Now a blast from the past, courtesy of the Raising Kaine archives:
"Wilson was an excellent wartime leader, supported womens' suffrage, pushed the Clayton Antitrust Act through Congress, created the Federal Reserve, etc., etc."
- Lowell Feld, 2006
It was buried deep in a comments thread, but google quickly picked it up.
And the context of that comment was what? I'm not sure how we got onto this discussion, or why you're digging through the comments section of the RK archives a couple days before Thanksgiving, but since you're so curious, my view on Wilson is that he was a mixed bag, that he did some good things (e.g., what I wrote at RK), but also had some REALLY bad personal beliefs (e.g., he was a white supremacist). The latter issue is probably why I've never though of him as a progressive champion, but perhaps you'd make the argument that he was. If so, I'd love to hear it.
Lowell,
On your first note, "Lowell" + "Woodrow Wilson" + "Raising Kaine" gave me the hit in about 15 seconds (give or take).
In regards the context of the comment, you were criticizing the method of deciding "presidential ratings" (historians rating previous president). You seemingly made the case for both moving Wilson up AND down from #6 by making a quick note on segregation, and then listing Wilson's accomplishments.
The point of my comment was to just answer the rhetorical question you had posed with your own answer.
You DID call Wilson a mixed bag on RK, but seeing as though the (initial) conversation was on your opinion of Wilson (in answering your other question, I too have no idea how EJB got us on this topic), I think it was appropriate to bring up.
Now, moving back to making a Wilson "progressive" case, let's consider the following: (Keep in mind, I'm playing devil's advocate)
We have to throw out Segregation as an issue as Wilson's main faults on African-American rights can be summarized as: Allowing for segregation in the Federal Government and denying appointments in the government to blacks.
Wilson never actively attacked the idea of racial equality, but more or less did the politically smart thing to do by refusing to spend the political capital require to fight it off (which, at the time would have been a lot of political capital)
Secondly, Wilson had not the resources (politically) to combat the fierce Southern Opposition to blacks in his government (among which, James Napier as Register of the Treasury, whom HE nominated).
Lastly, after throwing out the segregation argument, we fill in the progressive argument by using what you've already stated. ("excellent wartime leader, supported womens' suffrage, pushed the Clayton Antitrust Act through Congress, created the Federal Reserve")
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