Almost President (24 page)

While Reagan came into office with a conservative agenda to cut budgets and shift social programs back to the states, he was unable to eliminate a single major federal program or agency. While he cut the highest marginal income tax rates, he then had to raise other taxes in seven of his eight years as president to reduce deficits, and yet was still unable to submit a single balanced budget to Congress. The national debt tripled under his presidency. Rather than eliminate or privatize Social Security, Reagan appointed a commission that successfully ensured Social Security's solvency for decades without trimming benefits. “Americans are conservative,” said conservative columnist and Reagan admirer George Will. “What they want to conserve is the New Deal.”

This is what Dewey had concluded: Americans are conservative more in temperament than ideology. His imprint on Republican philosophy was still evident when President George H. W. Bush talked about launching “a thousand points of light” to respond to America's social welfare needs; when Bush's son, President George W. Bush, who had campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” greatly expanded Medicare and federal funding on education; and in the 2008 election, when Republicans eschewed more conservative choices and nominated the self-styled Republican “maverick” John McCain, known for working across the aisle with Democrats on issues such as immigration reform.

After 2008, the Tea Party movement agitated to purge the remnants of Republican liberals and moderates from its ranks and pursued the party realignment of pure conservatism that Dewey dreaded and predicted would lead to political disaster. Time will tell if Dewey's prophecy is correct, but Republicans should recall Dewey's legacy and wisdom. He lost the presidency twice, but he pointed the way for many other Republican victories.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ADLAI STEVENSON

1952, 1956

Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!

“All the eggheads” were for Adlai Stevenson in his 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, and the enthusiasm with which they embraced him has spurred Republicans ever since to argue that the Democratic Party abandoned the values of the middle class to become the party of the elite.

It is certainly true that intellectuals—and many common-man voters—loved the eloquence of Stevenson's speeches, the irony of his wit, the urbanity of his manners, and the contrast he provided to the self-consciously anti-intellectual campaigns waged against him by Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower's running mate, Richard Nixon. But while Stevenson was erudite, he was no fringe radical. He was governor of Illinois, located in the middle of America, and if that were not enough, he was raised but five miles from that supposed epicenter of Middle America, Peoria, of which it is said that if it “plays in Peoria” then it will be accepted anywhere in the heartland.

Yet, Republicans have, in virtually every election since 1952, leveled the charge that Democrats are out of touch with this very same Middle America. They point to polling that shows that those who attend religious services regularly, which “average Americans” presumably do, tend to vote Republican, while those who do not tend to vote Democratic.
11
They argue that while the Democrats once dominated the heartland regions of the Midwest and South, these are now Republican strongholds. And while this formulation presupposes that the East and West Coasts, which are now the centers of Democratic strength, must be lacking in middle class Americans, even some Democrats suggest the charge of Democratic elitism has merit.

Ted Strickland, the Democratic governor of Ohio from 2007 to 2011, fretted that Democrats no longer make the populist appeals that lent the party its nickname, “Party of the People,” because of “a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication.”
12
And Thomas Frank, the author of several books that question why the Democrats have supposedly lost touch with the middle class, has written that “at the bottom of their hearts, many of the [Democratic] party's biggest thinkers agree with the ‘liberal elite' stereotype. They can't simply point to their working-class base and their service to working-class America, because they aren't interested in that base; they haven't tried to serve that constituency for decades.”

Conservative critics point to Stevenson's campaign as that point, decades ago, when the Democrats supposedly abandoned the working-class. Conservative political analyst Michael Barone charged that Stevenson “was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle class American culture.” Conservative commentator George Will added the charge that the “cultural liberalism” and “condescension” of “the post-Stevenson Democratic Party” drove Southern whites and Northern blue-collar ethnic voters out of the Democratic Party.

Yet, there is no evidence that Stevenson's intellect was anything but an asset during his two campaigns. And while Stevenson was twice defeated for the presidency, Americans have since elected presidents who have been a Rhodes Scholar (Clinton), studied nuclear physics (Carter), and won the Pulitzer Prize (Kennedy). All of these presidents were Democrats, however, so perhaps Stevenson did set “the tone for a new era of Democratic politics” well before the “Camelot” presidency of John Kennedy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that it was Stevenson who “made JFK possible.” And it was Stevenson's inspirational and high-minded tone, which predates the rhetoric of Kennedy's “New Frontier,” that subsequent Democratic nominees from JFK to Barack Obama have emulated.

To contrast themselves against this supposed Democratic elitism, Republican candidates, even if descended from prominent families and holding Ivy League degrees, have aggressively promoted themselves as having middlebrow tastes, much as Eisenhower and Nixon did in their campaigns against Stevenson. President George H. W. Bush, an alumnus of Yale, insisted his favorite snack was pork rinds. His son, President George W. Bush, with degrees from both Yale
and
Harvard, stated that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. Former Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan insisted his favorite recreation was clearing brush at his ranch located near Santa Barbara, California.

In turn, Democrats have charged since 1952 that the Republicans have become extreme in their anti-intellectualism, despising experts of all stripes, and espousing a governing philosophy that represents, in a phrase used by former vice president Al Gore, an “assault on reason.” So ingrained did this perceived difference in the two parties' intellectual appeals become that one political writer declared that by 2010, American elections were a battle over “who's stupid, and who's a snob.” Eloquence was also under assault, as Obama's rhetoric, inspirational to many, was dismissed as a “platitude” by his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, and “vaporous” by conservative columnist David Brooks.

The debate over whether intelligence and eloquence are assets or liabilities for a political candidate seems to date back to Stevenson, when the question was acknowledged as a “strange, recurring sub-issue” during his 1952 campaign. Those who could be described as intellectuals did embrace Stevenson “with a readiness and a unanimity that seems without parallel in American history,” according to historian Richard Hofstadter. So closely did intellectuals identify with Stevenson, Hofstadter added, that they questioned whether his defeat by the bland Eisenhower and the mawkish Nixon represented a rejection of “American intellectuals and of intellect itself.”

The excitement Stevenson stirred among intellectuals was so pronounced that it caught the attention of the conservative columnist Stewart Alsop, who is credited with adding the word “egghead” to the English lexicon. The origin of the term began with an argument Alsop had with his brother, John, a Republican official in Connecticut, in which he asserted that “while Stevenson was appealing and appealed strongly to people's minds, Eisenhower, as a man and as a figure, was appealing far more strongly to far more people's emotions.” Alsop said his brother then began imagining what a typical intellectual supporter of Stevenson looked like and envisioned someone with a smooth, balding head, like the candidate himself, and said, “Sure, all the eggheads are for Stevenson, but how many eggheads are there?”

Alsop used the word in his column, it stuck, and Republicans pounced on it as a pejorative that they hoped would feed into the perception that Stevenson was removed from the concerns of the average voter. Novelist Louis Bromfield, writing in the conservative publication
the
Freeman,
said a future dictionary would define “egghead” as someone of “spurious intellectual pretensions . . . supercilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men.” Further, an egghead was likely to be a “doctrinaire” socialist and “self-conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same place.”

One of the several ironies of the attacks made by Bromfield and other conservatives on Stevenson's intellectual supporters is that they were occurring at the very time that conservatives were seeking to validate an intellectual tradition of their own. Stung by barbs from academics like Lionel Trilling that there were no conservative ideas worthy of serious consideration, Russell Kirk published
The Conservative Mind
in 1953, which argued that there was, in fact, a coherent conservative intellectual tradition dating to the English philosopher Edmund Burke. Two years after Kirk's book was published, William F. Buckley founded the
National Review
as a journal for conservative intellectuals—who presumably did not see themselves as eggheads.

Stevenson professed to be baffled by the word “egghead,” joking after the 1952 campaign that it must have been meant to describe “the more intelligensiac members of that lunatic fringe who thought I was going to win.” He did not seem to know exactly how to address the unprecedented accusation that he was too smart for the average American voter. He tried to deflect the issue with humor and silly puns. “Eggheads of the world, unite!” he once exclaimed. “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” At other times Stevenson's humor was more biting. In remarks made a few weeks after his 1952 loss, Stevenson said of the voters, “As to their wisdom, well, Coca-Cola still outsells champagne.” Four years later, during his second losing campaign, a woman shouted to Stevenson, “Governor, all the thinking people are for you!” To which Stevenson offered the immediate riposte, “Yes, madam, but I need a majority to win!”

Conservative critics like Barone tut-tut that “it is unthinkable that Franklin Roosevelt would ever have said those things, or that such thoughts would ever have crossed his mind.” Roosevelt, despite his Ivy League education and patrician background, delighted in affecting middle class airs, with his “fireside chats” and serving hot dogs to the King and Queen of England when they visited his home. Stevenson preferred the finer things in life, including champagne, and he also seemed a stark contrast to the Democrat still in the White House, Harry Truman, who was widely read but never attended college.

It is easy to accuse Barone and Stevenson's other critics of simply not appreciating Stevenson's postmodern sense of humor. Yet, while Stevenson made jokes about his intellect, there were, in fact, serious discussions within his campaign about whether his intelligence was a handicap. At a strategy meeting late in the 1952 campaign, Stevenson supporter and New York governor Averill Harriman opined that the great problem with the campaign was “that the thinking minority had been convinced but that [Stevenson] had made very little inroad on the unthinking majority.” Advisors bemoaned that Stevenson had the ability to persuade those who used reason to make their choice but that he could not excite the multitudes that, they presumed, based their choice on an emotional response. Ike, it was acknowledged, was better at that.

Later in the campaign, longtime CBS newsman Eric Sevareid set aside his professional objectivity and wrote a detailed confidential memorandum to the Stevenson campaign, outlining the problems faced by a candidate who preferred to appeal to voters' reason rather than their emotions:

In his almost painful honesty, he [Stevenson] . . . has been analyzing, not asserting; he has been projecting, not an image of the big, competent father, or brother, but of the moral and intellectual proctor, the gadfly called conscience. In so doing he has revealed an integrity rare in American politics, a luminosity of intelligence unmatched on the political scene today; he has caught the imagination of intellectuals, of all those who are really informed; he has excited the passions of the mind; he has not excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, nor, among these, has he created a feeling of Trust, of Authority, of Certainty that he knows where he is going and what must be done.

Harriman's and Sevareid's analyses project the very condescension criticized by Barone and Will, a sense that Stevenson was simply “too good” for the majority of the people whom he sought to lead. Stevenson, himself, would have vigorously disagreed.

Throughout the 1952 campaign, there was a great deal of worry that Stevenson was “talking over the heads of the American people.” Of course, no one would admit that Stevenson was talking over
their
heads; they were simply worried about their dimmer neighbor down the street. The journalist Richard Rovere said he overheard a bus driver, whom he felt fit the very definition of the common man, telling some passengers, “I don't suppose the
average
fellow's going to catch on to what he's saying. But I'm telling you, this is just what
I've
been waiting for.”

Stevenson, showing more humility than many of his supporters, insisted he had spoken over the heads of the people only once during the campaign—when his train was parked on a trestle and he addressed an audience below. But there is no doubt that Stevenson's speeches were different from those heard during most campaigns before or since.

In most campaigns, at least those that aim to win, the candidate develops a formulaic stump speech and then maintains the discipline to give that speech over and over, never deviating from the central message, in the hope that repetition will work as well for them as it does for a commercial product. But Stevenson refused to be sold like “a box of corn flakes” and insisted on giving a unique address at virtually every opportunity. So intent was he on capturing just the right sentiment that he would order his airplane to circle the landing strip near a campaign rally while he struggled to find just the right phrase or word for the speech he would give to the waiting crowd.