Open Left

Accidental change agents

One of the points made is that Teddy Roosevelt was a change agent leading the governing political party whereas so far Obama has leaned towards the establishment.  TR was not elected President in either 1896 or 1900.  In fact, he was added to the Republican ticket as the second banana to the establishment William McKinley in order to prevent reform.  Specifically, TR was a surprisingly reformist Governor of NY (then easily the largest state like CA today).  The NY bosses saw placing him on the national ticket as a nifty way to end reform in NY at no cost.  An assassin's bullet and lousy medical care substituted TR for McKinley.  The Karl Rove of the day, Mark Hanna, was distrought that "that damned cowboy" was President.

A second road to reform is the election of a presumed establishment candidate who turns into a reformer.  A great example of that is Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico.  I can make the case that the "moderate" Abraham Lincoln played the same part.  Similarly, FDR in 1932 presented himself as far more conservative than he became.

Well, I don't see Joe Biden as the reformer shoved onto the ticket to remove him from the national scene nor do I see any personal threats arising.  The best chance is the hidden reformer.  Lincoln may have waited to nudge the public opinion but compared to other successful northern politicians he was unwilling to give up on core principles and his party was quite happy to enact a generation of unpassed legislation now that the southern roadblock was temporarily gone.

We don't have a Cardenas, a Lincoln, an FDR, even a TR or Jefferson just yet.  The question becomes whether circumstances and/or pressures from below can make him into a genuine reformer.  One advantage of a tabula rasa election is that the candidate can appeal to widely different voters.  A second advantage is that anything is possible.  Well, how do we get anything to be our anything?

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by: David Kowalski @ Sat Jun 27, 2009 at 19:10:54 PM CDT