I listened to Hillary last night. Next time Obama ought to invite McCain.
If a political convention could be compared to a wedding, the candidate would be the bride and the delegates the groom. At this wedding, Hillary played the role of jilted ex-girl-friend being a good sport to the hilt.
Jilted Hillary wanted the groom to know just what he (they) was missing. The delegates responded to her passion with loud cheers. She regaled them with every program she had ever offered, with heart rending campaign stories – they were enthralled. Even the newscasters were shouting, “She hit a homerun!! A five hundred foot ball!!” Will they shout like that for Obama?
Basically she gave the nomination acceptance speech she has practiced for sixteen years – throwing in a few kind words for the lucky bride. Hillary left no doubt that she would shed no tears if the bride took a fatal tumble down the church steps. She’d be there to comfort the groom – now or four years from now.
It was instructive to observe Michelle OBama’s face during Hillary’s performance. Michelle is nobody’s fool, and her face showed it.
Both she and Hillary know that a candidate can be torpedoed by a rival in his own party. It’s risky. Reagan did it to Ford in 1976 and took all the marbles in 1980. Ted Kennedy did it to Carter in 1980 and wasn’t even considered in ’84 or ’88.
Will it succeed this time? Who knows. But it’s fun to watch.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Kennedys at Denver
What brought the Kennedys out Monday night at the Democratic Convention – one mortally sick, the other a lifetime recluse, giving the speeches of their lives? Sorry, Barrack, it wasn’t merely you.
What we had that night was three hundred years of American history, with all of its humiliations and its hatreds, served up raw. What they teach you in Eighth Grade American History will never explain why they came.
You have to remember – and know – that hatred and fear of Catholics goes farther back in American history than hatred and fear of blacks. The Kennedys have felt it firsthand.
Imagine the humiliation for Carolyn’s daddy when he, a United States Senator, had to go before a roomful of Protestant clerics and demean himself by promising not to let his Catholicism subvert the American Constitution.
His father had been the first Chairman of the SEC and an ambassador to Great Britain. Both were educated at Boston Latin and Harvard. No other presidential candidate has had to suffer such humiliation to be elected.
No doubt they remembered the first Catholic to run for President. The happy warrior. Al Smith. Buried in 1928 in a sludge of anti-Catholic vitriol. After that it would take 32 years to nominate a second. Kennedy, in 1960, went, hat in hand, and pleaded with the Protestants to let him in.
Washington reeks with the memory of the Know-Nothings, the Mug-wumps, and the Ku Klux Klan – all of whom stood for a sometimes violent anti-Catholicism. Just walking across the Mall – or looking out the Oval Office window – had to show the Kennedys a blatant symbol of anti-Catholic sentiment. A third the way up the obelisk is the line where furious Protestants stopped the building of the Washington Monument in the 1840s.
Nearly every nation sent a stone to honor President Washington, including the Pope who, at the time ruled a country called the Vatican States in central Italy. Protestants would have none of it. They rioted, burned the scaffolding and demolished the papal stone. The monument stood unfinished for 40 years as the lower part weathered. Thus the anti-Pope line.
Very possibly stories were told in the Kennedy home of the days in Boston – and America -- when Help Wanted notices ended with, “No Irish Need Apply”. Or the colloquialism, “Hit ‘im again, he’s Irish.”
Or, how about the public school movement that began in Massachusetts under Horace Mann in the 1830s? When the state seemed likely to be inundated by an influx of unlettered and unwashed Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine ten years later, one of the subtle purposes of the new, unified curriculum became that of turning these grubby Catholics into well scrubbed Protestants.
[Is it possible that one small part of the problem with American schools is that a system essentially designed to create social and religious change does not do all that well when translated into teaching academic subjects like math, chemistry or grammar? Possibly the uniformity that can be imposed on social behaviors doesn’t work all that well on academics. Ah, but that’s another subject.]
Catholics, of course, countered by creating and strengthening their own schools where a Catholic could learn to read and go on being Catholic. (My own Protestant forefathers created a system of Dutch language schools in the 1870s for approximately the same reason. So did Lutherans, etc.)
Were the Kennedys aware that American fear and hatred of Catholics goes back to 1607, when Jamestown colony was situated where it was so that the colonists could defend themselves from Spanish Catholic attack – a very real threat. Or what of Massachusetts which suffered the equivalent of a community-wide nervous breakdown when Catholic France sent the Indians down to kill Protestant Englishmen in 1689?
Panicked Protestant refugees fled toward coastal towns. One such was Salem, which collapsed in a paroxysm of finger pointing that became the witch trials of 1692.
The French Catholics came again and again in the Eighteenth Century as Protestant England and Catholic France fought it out for world domination. French Indian allies scalped English colonists and English Indian allies scalped French colonists. Being English we viewed the world from the Protestant point of view.
Another bit of history: when Catholic France was forced out of North America in 1763, they left behind a restive Indian population – who wiped out an entire chain of British forts in a single year. They also left behind a French populace in Quebec that was hostile to all things English and Protestant.
To propitiate these two populations without spending huge sums on an army of occupation, the English passed the Quebec Act of 1767. It took the area west of the Alleghenies away from the Thirteen colonies and legitimized Catholicism (which had been banned from England) in America. This one act made the American Revolution inevitable.
[In a wonderful stroke of irony, the Protestant American colonies at once allied themselves with Catholic France against Protestant England. In 1776, the British sent a huge expeditionary force to the colonies for the express purpose of defending English democracy from French Catholic tyranny – personified by Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World, George Washington – himself a lifelong member of the Protestant Church of England. When the shooting stopped we went back to being militant Protestants. But we did have our first Catholic bishop – at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin. That bishop founded Georgetown {Catholic} University in what became the national capital.. Wheeeeeee.]
The anti-Catholic sentiment went on. Every decent American was quite certain that, given the chance, the Catholics would overthrow American democracy and establish a theocratic state with the Pope at its head. One of the charges made again Al Smith was that, were he elected, the Pope would leave Rome (where he was then a virtual prisoner of the Italian government) and sail up the Potomac to the White House.
I recall my own father saying in the 1950s that he felt Catholicism was a far worse threat to the US than Soviet Communism. He was not alone.
That’s what the Kennedys remembered and felt. That’s what brought Carolyn out of her isolation, brought the Senator off his sickbed. They saw another convention, with another Al Smith – a different color, Protestant, it is true – but none-the-less an Al Smith. They came out of the woodwork for him.
Not for just another Democrat – for that, Hillary might have been a more likely winner. Not just to defeat a disliked Republican – for that, too, there might have been a stronger choice. But for an Al Smith, a Happy Warrior, a man who might not win, but will definitely pave the way for the next black nominee.
Will this Al Smith win? He may carry too much baggage, too much residual fear and hatred. Small comfort to Senator O’Bama if he loses, but I remember what the function of the first wave in a World over War I infantry charge was. They were to fall dead on the barbed wire so that the next wave could walk on their backs. That may be what Al Smiths have to do, in politics as in war.
What we had that night was three hundred years of American history, with all of its humiliations and its hatreds, served up raw. What they teach you in Eighth Grade American History will never explain why they came.
You have to remember – and know – that hatred and fear of Catholics goes farther back in American history than hatred and fear of blacks. The Kennedys have felt it firsthand.
Imagine the humiliation for Carolyn’s daddy when he, a United States Senator, had to go before a roomful of Protestant clerics and demean himself by promising not to let his Catholicism subvert the American Constitution.
His father had been the first Chairman of the SEC and an ambassador to Great Britain. Both were educated at Boston Latin and Harvard. No other presidential candidate has had to suffer such humiliation to be elected.
No doubt they remembered the first Catholic to run for President. The happy warrior. Al Smith. Buried in 1928 in a sludge of anti-Catholic vitriol. After that it would take 32 years to nominate a second. Kennedy, in 1960, went, hat in hand, and pleaded with the Protestants to let him in.
Washington reeks with the memory of the Know-Nothings, the Mug-wumps, and the Ku Klux Klan – all of whom stood for a sometimes violent anti-Catholicism. Just walking across the Mall – or looking out the Oval Office window – had to show the Kennedys a blatant symbol of anti-Catholic sentiment. A third the way up the obelisk is the line where furious Protestants stopped the building of the Washington Monument in the 1840s.
Nearly every nation sent a stone to honor President Washington, including the Pope who, at the time ruled a country called the Vatican States in central Italy. Protestants would have none of it. They rioted, burned the scaffolding and demolished the papal stone. The monument stood unfinished for 40 years as the lower part weathered. Thus the anti-Pope line.
Very possibly stories were told in the Kennedy home of the days in Boston – and America -- when Help Wanted notices ended with, “No Irish Need Apply”. Or the colloquialism, “Hit ‘im again, he’s Irish.”
Or, how about the public school movement that began in Massachusetts under Horace Mann in the 1830s? When the state seemed likely to be inundated by an influx of unlettered and unwashed Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine ten years later, one of the subtle purposes of the new, unified curriculum became that of turning these grubby Catholics into well scrubbed Protestants.
[Is it possible that one small part of the problem with American schools is that a system essentially designed to create social and religious change does not do all that well when translated into teaching academic subjects like math, chemistry or grammar? Possibly the uniformity that can be imposed on social behaviors doesn’t work all that well on academics. Ah, but that’s another subject.]
Catholics, of course, countered by creating and strengthening their own schools where a Catholic could learn to read and go on being Catholic. (My own Protestant forefathers created a system of Dutch language schools in the 1870s for approximately the same reason. So did Lutherans, etc.)
Were the Kennedys aware that American fear and hatred of Catholics goes back to 1607, when Jamestown colony was situated where it was so that the colonists could defend themselves from Spanish Catholic attack – a very real threat. Or what of Massachusetts which suffered the equivalent of a community-wide nervous breakdown when Catholic France sent the Indians down to kill Protestant Englishmen in 1689?
Panicked Protestant refugees fled toward coastal towns. One such was Salem, which collapsed in a paroxysm of finger pointing that became the witch trials of 1692.
The French Catholics came again and again in the Eighteenth Century as Protestant England and Catholic France fought it out for world domination. French Indian allies scalped English colonists and English Indian allies scalped French colonists. Being English we viewed the world from the Protestant point of view.
Another bit of history: when Catholic France was forced out of North America in 1763, they left behind a restive Indian population – who wiped out an entire chain of British forts in a single year. They also left behind a French populace in Quebec that was hostile to all things English and Protestant.
To propitiate these two populations without spending huge sums on an army of occupation, the English passed the Quebec Act of 1767. It took the area west of the Alleghenies away from the Thirteen colonies and legitimized Catholicism (which had been banned from England) in America. This one act made the American Revolution inevitable.
[In a wonderful stroke of irony, the Protestant American colonies at once allied themselves with Catholic France against Protestant England. In 1776, the British sent a huge expeditionary force to the colonies for the express purpose of defending English democracy from French Catholic tyranny – personified by Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World, George Washington – himself a lifelong member of the Protestant Church of England. When the shooting stopped we went back to being militant Protestants. But we did have our first Catholic bishop – at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin. That bishop founded Georgetown {Catholic} University in what became the national capital.. Wheeeeeee.]
The anti-Catholic sentiment went on. Every decent American was quite certain that, given the chance, the Catholics would overthrow American democracy and establish a theocratic state with the Pope at its head. One of the charges made again Al Smith was that, were he elected, the Pope would leave Rome (where he was then a virtual prisoner of the Italian government) and sail up the Potomac to the White House.
I recall my own father saying in the 1950s that he felt Catholicism was a far worse threat to the US than Soviet Communism. He was not alone.
That’s what the Kennedys remembered and felt. That’s what brought Carolyn out of her isolation, brought the Senator off his sickbed. They saw another convention, with another Al Smith – a different color, Protestant, it is true – but none-the-less an Al Smith. They came out of the woodwork for him.
Not for just another Democrat – for that, Hillary might have been a more likely winner. Not just to defeat a disliked Republican – for that, too, there might have been a stronger choice. But for an Al Smith, a Happy Warrior, a man who might not win, but will definitely pave the way for the next black nominee.
Will this Al Smith win? He may carry too much baggage, too much residual fear and hatred. Small comfort to Senator O’Bama if he loses, but I remember what the function of the first wave in a World over War I infantry charge was. They were to fall dead on the barbed wire so that the next wave could walk on their backs. That may be what Al Smiths have to do, in politics as in war.
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