THE TAMING OF AMERICAN POLITICS
Meyer, Karl E.
The Taming of American Politics by KARL E. MEYER The most revealing wisecrack of the 1960 Presidential election is credited to Milton Berle. "In the old days," the veteran comedian remarked,...
...In their daily speeches, the two candidates repeated the same words and phrases over and over again, presumably to achieve maximum penetration: "It's time to get America moving again," "A record is something you build on, not stand on," "Give me your help, your hand," and so on...
...It is one of the ironies of the campaign that the change was heralded by a candidate from California, once one of our most rambunctious states, and by a candidate from Boston whose ancestors were at home in the milieu of The Last Hurrah...
...Nixon fairly reveled in them...
...Indeed, in many of the developing countries, the structure of the state and the emergence of a national spirit are problems as acute as they were in Lincoln's America...
...But the passage of a hundred years carried the country to the opposite shore, in which thinking men were more concerned with the excess of unum, rather than pluri-bus...
...As a consequence of the supermarket approach, the campaign seemed to be a frenetic struggle for public attention, rather than a systematic discussion of the issues that divide the parties...
...Although residual poverty, to our shame, still persists, it is fair to say that more Americans are better off than ever before...
...the vote for minor-party contenders fell to an all-time low...
...The players were different— and so was the script...
...The approach to issues in both camps disclosed a debt to advertising techniques...
...no speech was complete without a humble reference to his childhood and family, and a brigade of Hollywood celebrities provided the supporting cast for "Dial Dick Nixon," his last-minute TV talkathon that was full of electronic razzmatazz...
...In Lincoln's time, the great majority of Americans enjoyed a high degree of self-sufficiency either as farmers or as artisans...
...In 1960, our two living former Presidents, Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman, seemed like nostalgic remnants of the era of the country store...
...the White House, as Teddy Roosevelt remarked, is a bully pulpit...
...Razzmatazz in Fine Style...
...The decline of regionalism, of ethnic pluralism, and of dissident minorities—these tendencies raised new fears of a nation too closely bound by the invisible chords of radio and TV...
...It is estimated that thirty-eight per cent of the labor force is employed in organizations that have more than 500 employes...
...For good measure, both national party chairmen were, for the first time, members of the Senate too...
...In 1860, the Union was on the verge of dissolution...
...By 1960, the United States had become a two-party country—with a vengeance...
...It was a measure of the change that one candidate for Vice President was the grandson of a Senator most famous as the nemesis of the League of Nations, and the Democratic nominee for President was the son of an equally well-known Massachusetts isolationist...
...Fortunately, Kennedy showed promise during the campaign of being more than a supermarket politician...
...The Vice President's celebrated acceptance speech at Chicago, according to William Shannon of the New York Post, "was little more than an anthology of favorite selections, dating back to 1954...
...Whatever the vicissitudes of his past career, the President-elect displayed new qualities in his campaign which invite the hope that the days of inertia and aimlessness are coming to a close...
...Not only was this the first election in which it can be said that television made a deciKARL E. MEYER, editorial writer for the Washington Post, Is currently writing a book on the contemporary political scene...
...In the old days," the veteran comedian remarked, "after an election a losing candidate would announce humbly: 'The people have spoken.' Now, he'll simply shrug his shoulders and say: 'Well, that's show business.' " It was assuredly show business in 1960, so much so that there was about as much political reportage in Variety as in the more staid family journals (typical Variety headlines: "You'd Think the Nation's Electorate Were Voting for Either NBC or CBS," and, concerning the Nixon-Kennedy split-screen debate, "ABC Brings Off Some N.Y.-L.A...
...But the theatrical razzmatazz tended to distract attention from some important offstage changes that lay behind the close victory of Presidentelect John F. Kennedy...
...parties were divided on fundamental principle...
...the question of Nixon's makeup was as important as his position on Matsu...
...Lincoln failed to carry a single Southern state...
...He helped to overcome the doubts of many by the verve of his manner, the toughness of his mind, and his sense of history...
...A century later, the two parties were more nearly national than ever before...
...Even the "Great Debates" turned as much on external appearances as the substance of anything said...
...The central problem that faces the country and President-elect Kennedy is that much of the world is nearer to the America of 1860 than to the comfortable land of the present...
...The most obvious change since 1860 is that as a nation we have moved to the city...
...And, according to Fortune, forty million Americans now live in areas that are "strictly suburban...
...Khrushchev, Gomulka, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, Tito, Castro, and Sukarno—all of them committed men, most of whom had endured prison in behalf of a political cause...
...Some forty-three per cent of all non-farm families have an after-tax cash income of between $5,000 and $10,000...
...Repetition, simplicity of statement, identification with glamor, appeal to basic emotions—these are the hallmarks of a good television commercial, and this approach seemed to set the tone for both campaigns...
...A new generation, using novel political techniques, has assumed leadership of a country vastly different from the land our forefathers knew...
...It is indicative that the parties nominated the youngest pair of contenders for the Presidency at the very moment the oldest Chief Executive in our history sat in the White House...
...Even the race relations dispute, so profoundly divisive in 1860, seemed within view of resolution a century later...
...The changes implicit in the 1960 election can best be seen by looking backwards...
...All this reflects not only the changing circumstances of the country but also the characters of the two candidates...
...The country was too distracted to notice, but in 1960 America became the only Western democracy where third-party dissent was virtually inaudible...
...And by analogy, it could be said that our politics has moved from the country store to the supermarket...
...The modern supermarket is a national institution, standardized, glamorous, superbly efficient—and notably deodorized...
...and the nearly unanimous Southern choice for the Presidential nomination was a moderate Texan who presided over the enactment of the first civil rights laws since Reconstruction times...
...In 1960 the portrait was of a people who were prosperous and without marked political passion—and yet who were aware that the country was venturing into a difficult era...
...Throughout their careers, both men have been more interested in the means rather than the ends of politics...
...A century ago, the Presidential ballot contained four candidates, every one of whom received a significant portion of the vote...
...A century ago, four-fifths of our population lived in rural areas...
...Dixie did not secede from the Democrats...
...In 1960, a year of epochal change in Africa and Latin America, and a time of decision in the United States, the characteristic titles of best-sellers were Enjoy, Enjoy!, The Good Years, and How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market...
...Television has created a new constituency which overrides the boundaries of the precinct—and the camera's eye has had a ruinous effect on the secluded, smoke-filled rooms at conventions...
...Lincoln's America was an alliance of proud and quarrelsome states, and Washington, D.C., was widely regarded as the lair of Satan...
...A pervasive national spirit could be detected in every aspect of the 1960 campaign...
...In 1860, separatist passions put the very existence of an American nation in doubt...
...In the coming years, it is my fear that we shall find the national stage occupied by two powerful and truly national parties, growing more alike all the time, in which the premium will not be on issues but on dramatic expertise...
...It is not the mechanics but the ideas of politics that have caught the imagination of the emerging masses of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...Both parties adopted "strong" civil rights planks...
...The contrast between the two Presidential candidates and the score of heads-of-government who arrived on our shores could not have been more starkly dramatic...
...The consensus between the two national party platforms and the four national candidates was remarkable...
...Nixon was especially notorious for this practice...
...But economic success in nations as well as individuals can be accompanied by lassitude and flabbiness...
...It is of course necessary to be on guard against complacent reflections on our affluence, but nonetheless it speaks well for America that by 1970, the Census Bureau estimates, nearly a third of all college-age persons will be enrolled on some campus...
...But his lapses in taste were few, and the Senator always appeared a little uncomfortable about soap opera techniques...
...The President of the United States does not have to worry about his Trendex rating...
...He was nearly right...
...Equally striking was the eclipse of the local political boss as a controlling figure in the national conventions...
...The ancient taboos have weakened...
...and the victory went to a frontier-born lawyer who was practically a stranger to Washington...
...Isolationism, like the Confederacy, had become a lost cause...
...It may be that Kennedy, who owed his election in large part to television, can use this medium for more than razzmatazz...
...A series of long-term institutional changes lie behind the election results...
...Nowadays, we are a nation of hired men...
...While Kennedy was clearly the more cerebral of the candidates, he was not above trying to snare the consumer with glamor or sentiment...
...it caused scarcely a ripple of comment when members of the Jewish faith were elected governor of Connecticut and Senator from Oregon...
...Then, the world outside was only a distant witness to our campaign— not a participant...
...It was a testament to a new national enlightenment that, despite pockets of anti-Catholicism, especially along the middle border, the United States elected its first Catholic President—with the help of the majority of the Southern (and Protestant) states...
...Ethnically, we are nearly all (ninety-five per cent) American born, and eighty per cent of the population is of third generation stock...
...as Time quoted Kennedy: "In my family we were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole process...
...Even the argot of politics was affected...
...In 1860, the vote was sectional...
...Both men entered politics as much through chance as through decision...
...At the time of Nikita Khrushchev's visit to America, Walter Lippmann wrote: "The critical weakness in our society is that for the time being our people do not have great purposes which they are united in wanting to achieve . . . We talk about ourselves these days as if we were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes, and has no further great business to transact...
...The old differences which used to fence people apart have been gradually leveled...
...Their style of politics was several light years distant from that of the two young men who stepped briskly into and out of the suburban shopping centers...
...Perhaps the most meaningful episode of the whole campaign was the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York...
...The oldtime country store was local, individualistic, homely, inefficient—and pungently aromatic...
...With the detachment of a sales executive appraising a rival promotion drive, Nixon observed in early November that the Democrats had "peaked" their campaign too early...
...Ten decades later, every active candidate for the Presidency was a job-holder in Washington (Nixon, Kennedy, Humphrey, Symington, and Johnson), and the subsequent national tickets were composed of four men who rose to prominence from the Senate...
...For the first time since its founding, the Socialist Party withdrew altogether from the Presidential battle...
...the contents of the package far too little...
...Kennedy entered politics because his older brother, who had been tapped for a career in public service, was killed in action during World War II...
...an offspring of Irish grandparents will sit in the White House, and Negroes are edging toward at least the outer fringes of the power elite...
...Although both men came of age during the New Deal era, neither—characteristically—was caught up in the passions of the time...
...Nixon has freely confessed that if Sullivan & Cromwell had offered him a job after his graduation, "I am sure I would be there today, a corporation lawyer instead of Vice President...
...Let us compare it, for example, to the campaign a century before which sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House...
...sive difference, but the campaign also marked the culmination of a score of long-term changes in our politics...
...At times during the campaign, it seemed as if the country were caught in a sales war between Safeway and the A&P...
...today, the farm population has shrunk drastically and at least five out of six Americans live in urban areas...
...reporters called his standard, pre-tested utterance The Speech...
...Midway in the debates, Joseph Alsop lamented: "To date, in truth, a good deal of the private comment on this campaign has suggested that Presidential candidates are like dogfood...
...And it is with these men that the Kennedy Administration will have to deal...
...Even the most persistent one-party enclaves—including South Carolina and Maine—became battlegrounds during the campaign...
...The packaging has got all the attention...
...Every Presidential campaign is a mirror of the nation...
...In 1960, as if to underline the change, a score of foreign heads-of-government were in New York in the midst of our election...
...If the Great Debates proved a disappointment, President Kennedy's talents as a monologist have not yet been tried...
...Viewed in retrospect, the 1960 election may mark the taming of American politics...
...The challenge to Kennedy will be to communicate something of the ferment in the outer world to a people who have been lulled for eight years by government-as-usual...
...the key words we remember were "image," "format," "exposure," and "prestige"^—all borrowed from Madison Avenue...
...However, the closeness of the vote suggests that whatever John F. Kennedy's intentions, the nation he will lead is not yet in a very adventurous mood...
...Thus, in 1960, the American people had to choose between two candidates who, except for accidents of birth and local circumstance, might have wound up in the other's party, or in one of the sprawling organizations that now sets the tone of American life...
...We have, in sum, moved from a decentralized to a mass society, and our interests have shifted from the ardors of production to the comforts of consumption...
...The web of interdependence now binds even the professional man and the small entrepreneur whose livelihood is directly affected by Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government...
...Yet, so far as foreign policy was concerned, Henry Cabot Lodge and John F. Kennedy had more in common with each other than either had with his illustrious forebears...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
