Ben sent me the link to an The American Prospect piece, “The Myth of Bipartisanship,” in which Ezra Klein becomes only the latest writer to declare Obama’s experiment with post-partisan politics dead. Klein even gives one of the more rational accounts I have seen of why it really made no sense for the Republicans to support the stimulus package (a term I do wish that someone in the No-Drama Zone had thought to replace — it sounds like hospital equipment). It’s the role of the opposition party to oppose what a congressional majority and administration of the other party want, and it is a role the GOP is better able to play than ever because of the way everything but their hard southern and western core (the Bryan coalition) has been shorn away in the last two elections.

It was certainly sobering to have the House minority give the historic new president zero votes in his first bid to save the country, but it should not have been surprising, and not just in view of the modern GOP’s total irresponsibility regarding outmoded stuff like the national interest, the common good, and basic factuality. Ideologically the stimulus bill, the very idea of a stimulus bill on this scale, flies in the face of everything that the GOP thinks it has stood for for the last 30 years. I do not credit them for standing against government spending or deficits, since they love both of those as long as they are directed toward the military budget or tax cuts for the wealthy. However, the party of Reagan has pretty consistently set itself against the idea of government spending directed toward some common social purpose and, more fundamentally, against the idea that government can ever effect positive changes besides blowing stuff up in other countries. So the stakes are really quite high for the Republicans, and they are almost certainly going to lose this battle. The final bill may still contain too many tax cuts and not enough spending, but all the GOP has been able to do is fly their Hoover flag high in a time when that is not the public mood, to say the least.

I am a big believer in democratic party systems, and in my own work could probably be fairly accused of celebrating partisanship and partisan politicians. Yet, supporter and understander of partisanship though I may be, and glad as I am to see Obama leaving a bit of his post-partisan stance behind, his experiment did have a larger purpose and a wider audience than most of his left-blogosphere critics seem to understand. Large chunks of the electorate really do believe that partisanship is a problem. They want to see a president more oriented toward bringing people together to solve problems than scoring victories or, more to the point for left-blogosphere critics, engineering massive ideological shifts in American governance.

The thing is, even though the U.S. to some extent invented the modern political party, the institution of the political party has never been fully accepted on a cultural level, especially in the normative culture of middle-class American families. (See the writings of Ronald Forimisano, Mark Voss-Hubbard, and other contrarian political historians for chapter and verse on this.) Think about it: virtually every local club and organization in the country replicates the national political model on its own level, but only in part. Usually there is a constitution and almost always there are popularly elected officials, but how often do you see your local PTA or Elks Club further organized by parties? Almost never on an official level, even in cases (like many school boards) where party ideologies are in fact at work.  Frustrating as it is for many of us political intellectuals (if I may), Americans are comfortable with voting in popularity contests, but not with party organization and party ideology and the rest, even in their most high-minded forms. Call it false consciousness, call it self-defeating, but I think that’s where most Americans are at in terms of their ideas of appropriate political behavior.

It is to this broader political culture that Barack Obama has constantly addressed himself, and generally with much more success than practitioners of the neo-partisan approach popular in the blogosphere. Long story short: Obama played in Iowa, but Howard Dean really didn’t, in ways that predicted bigger things to come. There is a place for both approaches, but we need to respect the fact that Obama’s now has some empirical evidence to back it up (i.e., he’s president despite the Republican Noise Machine’s worst efforts). In the case of the stimulus, the president seems to have gotten in the end more or less what he wanted in the first place at the cost of letting the Republicans bloviate on cable for a few days and panicking a few of the liberal bloggers and columnists. In return, he retains the moral high ground and standing with the public at large that he will doubtless badly need for other crises yet to come, including the next stages of this one.

SIDENOTE: The point of Klein’s piece was to call for an end to the filibuster, a rant that I too have inflicted on friends and relatives several times in recent days.  While I still think that Harry Reid and his predecessors have made a mistake allowing the filibuster to become more or less automatic, it turns out that the filibuster is not the only constraint empowering those annoying Senate centrists. Read “Why will the stimulus require 60 votes to pass?” It turns out you can learn from the Internets after all. The deeper problem, of course, is equal state representation in the Senate.

While last week’s NYT article on the South’s waning influence in national elections was one more example of the bigot hunt that the media has been on ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, it nevertheless makes a good point about the dead end the GOP has rushed into by over-relying for too long on the Southern strategy of somewhat indirectly stirring up the racial and cultural antipathies of southern, rural, and less educated voters. “They’ve maxed out on the South,” political scientist Merle Black is quoted saying in the story, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.” The underlying problem is that while there seem to be NASCAR fans and mega-churches everywhere these days, the South’s fundamentalist political style does not travel all that well, or age gracefully when it does. Non-southerners (and a non-trivial minority of southerners) get tired of being harangued and bullied after a while. More than that, perhaps, the high emotional key and folksy inflection just do not suit voters without the necessary white, rural, evangelical Protestant background/mindset. Life in the big city seems to foster a more complicated view of the world.

What the 2008 Electoral College map shows more than ever is that the Republicans now find themselves with the coalition the Democrats had at the beginning of one of their least competitive periods a century or more ago. That would be the William Jennings Bryan coalition of the Solid South plus the Plains and mining West, the Great Commoner’s ticket to presidential election losses in 1896, 1900, and 1908. While Bryan was far more intelligent and humane than either John McCain or Sarah Palin, he appealed heavily to rural Protestant self-righteousness, building on the remains of the Populist Party, and lost crucial northeastern working-class Catholic votes that the Democrats have always needed to win national elections.  Twisting the Populist platform of economic reform into the nostrum of “Free Silver,” with an assist from western mining interests, the Bryan Democrats were defeated in 1896 by William McKinley and his “Full Dinner Pail” of typical Federalist/Whig/GOP trickle-down economics, which seemed the safe and rational alternative when contrasted with Bryan’s emotionalism.

Far from learning from their mistake, the Bryan Democrats nominated their favorite two more times and saw him beaten even more badly each outing. In his later years, Bryan made his alliance with evangelical Protestantism (and status as a political ancestor of modern Christian conservatism) even clearer by stumping against evolution and taking the anti-monkey (I mean, anti-evolution) side in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  Coming from Nebraska, Bryan also forged the political and cultural connection between the Plains states and the South that disappeared for a time at mid-century but reemerged with a vengeance in the the GOP culture wars that have raged ever since the Clinton sex scandals.

Let’s go to the maps. From Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, here’s the election of 1896 (note the historically correct use of red for the Democrats and blue for the GOP):

Now 2008:

The South’s larger, migration-fueled population in recent times made the Bryan coalition a bit more winnable for the modern GOP than it was for the Bryan Democrats. That is, until one consequence of northern migration below the Mason-Dixon inevitably made itself felt: as educated Northeasterners moved further south down I-95 into northern Virginia and then fanned out into the burgeoning cities of central North Carolina, they brought some of their more tolerant attitudes and modernity-friendly politics with them. This effect is certain to spread in the future. The solid South will go back to its loser status and stay there for awhile as key parts of it become more diverse and break away, and the rest gets more and more offensive to everyone else.

After the jump, a salute to the sort of “culture and heritage” that today’s GOP increasingly follows in the footsteps of:

(more…)

Just a couple more Election Day thoughts before the other shoes start dropping:

The Fairview Elementary Vote
Our local bellwether, the poll of the students at Owen’s school (and Isaac’s alma mater), went for Obama after falling to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Obama carried the 2nd, 3rd, 4th (by three votes), and 5th grades, while McCain held on to only the 1st graders. Thus we see political preferences tracking with levels of education even in elementary school. (Kindergarteners do not yet have the franchise at Fairview.) The college town of Columbia is Democratic as a whole, but the Fairview area is much more conservative, a pretty good index of the conventional Middle American wisdom on just about anything. So, know hope, as Andrew Sullivan would say.

Student Turnout
On another hopeful note, for first time since I have worked at MU, the usually deserted voting precinct at Memorial Union was full of kids waiting in line, and an Obama crowd from the looks of them. That is to say, lots of students of color or of hippie-esque/boho demeanor rather than the fraternity-sorority types who are very numerous on our campus. The Obama operation has been incredibly active here — three different storefronts downtown — and it seems to be paying off. Might the youth vote actually materialize for once?

Ground Gaming
All that said, I really worry about all the emphasis on Obama’s superior “ground game” and what an advantage that is.  In the Common-Place politics issue, Reeve Huston made a strong historical argument that Obama’s emphasis on community organization was the distinctive aspect of his campaign and part of a long American tradition going back to the Workingmen’s Parties. I get that, but I also can’t help noticing how deeply and ideologically invested Democrats have long been in the idea that newly rights-bearing masses are always behind them, if only the masses can be properly informed and organized. The tendency has always been to rely more on organization and the mechanics of getting out the vote than effective, coherently ideological campaigning. 2004 was a partcularly bad case of this tendency. I really bought into the “emerging Democratic majority” and “new voter” propaganda put out by Ruy Texeira, MoveOn.org, DailyKos, and others in 2004, under which we were supposed to win despite John Kerry’s lackluster campaign, and it just never panned out. There were new voters all right, but a lot of them were Republican evangelicals. Obama has been a far superior candidate, but the overreliance on organization is still there, I think. [POST-ELECTION UPDATE: Very glad to be wrong to worry about this, apparently.]

. . . on the media’s imagination, blogosphere included.

Finally, we come to the sense-shattering climax of Veepstakes 2008. It does give the TV & blog people something to talk about, at least until the hurricanes hit. I don’t mean to be a killjoy. I have long been a fan of Joe Biden, despite his serial hopeless presidential candidacies, and choosing him was a nice, low-key way to address Obama’s East Coast Catholic and foreign policy flanks. And with this Sarah Palin pick, we finally have our 49th & 50th states represented on a national ticket (if we count Obama for Hawaii). Of course, I have not looked to check that North Dakota, Idaho, Rhode Island, and such have been covered, but we now can rest assured that Delaware and Alaska are in the bag.

Yet I would lose my political historian’s license if I did not emphasize just how little vice-presidential picks matter, electorally speaking. Voters vote for president, the top, nation-embodying office, and always have, even back in 1796 when only local electors were actually running.

Now, the fact that the Veep might have to assume the main office, we should take seriously. [Something McCain, apparently, does not take seriously.] The Whigs wished they could have had a do-over on that John Tyler pick, and the Radical Republicans nearly succeeded in doing Andrew Johnson over. Yet electorally, and barring presidential death, it has almost never been a big thing. Lyndon Johnson and John Nance Garner brought some Texas-style political muscle to their respective tickets, yeee-haawww, but Texas was still a Democratic state back then.

The example that seems to hang over the veep-stakes in recent times has been Missouri’s own Tom Eagleton from 1972. While the Democrats’ craven handling of that episode certainly did not help McGovern in November, the idea that a 49-state, 23-point pulping like 1972 could truly hinge on a momentary running mate snafu is the kind of thing that only a pundit could actually believe. Let’s just say there were some larger forces at work.

In most other presidential elections, even objectively disastrous picks have just not mattered. Dan Quayle, anyone? Take Dukakis running mate Lloyd Bentsen’s celebrated pantsing of Dan Quayle in 1988.

It became “one of the most famous moments in US political history” (per the YouTube caption) and entered the permanent cultural lexicon, all the way to getting referenced in children’s Christmas specials. Yet it hardly saved the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket, or even made any difference at all as far as I can tell. Perhaps a non-Quayle would have helped Bush père a bit more in 1992, but I am really just saying that to be nice.

1992 may only be the second-best example of why running mates don’t matter very much. The best one is probably 1836. Martin Van Buren’s controversial veep pick was Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, a national hero in some circles for allegedly killing Tecumseh and fighting to keep the post offices open on Sunday. Suffice it to say that Johnson turned out to have some serious negatives. In a country where only white men could vote, and where questioning racism in any way drew vilification and mob violence, Johnson was exposed as having lived openly with an African-American woman named Julia Chinn and the couple’s two mixed-race daughters, whom Johnson educated and married off to white men. The Whig press, really still just proto-Whig at this point, heavily publicized Johnson’s private life and clucked that such race-mixing was the inevitable result of Democratic slumming and demagoguery. The U.S. would be seen as a “national of mulattoes” if Van Buren and Johnson were elected, one newspaper warned. A racist political cartoon was published depicting the Johnson family at home. [For an excellent article on the incident, see Thomas Brown, "The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson As an Issue in the National Election Campaign of 1835-1836," Civil War History 39 (1993): 5-30.]

Old Kinderhook’s problematic image down south was not improved by the controversy, but he won the election anyway, carrying Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, and other states not known for their open-mindedness on racial matters. Looking at the map, Johnson’s unorthodox living arrangements may have hurt Van Buren as much with northern bluenoses, also usually racists, as it did with southerners. At any rate, Van Buren was hardly doomed even by such a catastrophic pick as Johnson.

Andrew Sullivan’s take on the Sarah Palin pick seems about right. Ruth Rosen’s too, in a less happy vein:

Sarah Palin is the inexperienced woman Sen. John McCain has chosen as his running mate, hoping that she will attract the vital female vote. It’s the worst kind of affirmative action, choosing a person he barely knows, who is completely unprepared to assume any national office. It’s like nominating Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

You might even say it is the Republican version of affirmative action, where any member of the underrepresented group will do as along as they espouse GOP orthodoxy.

McCain’s “bold” move would also seem to be based on a fairly puerile piece of political analysis, as well: that disgruntled female Hillary supporters are so disgruntled they would now vote for any woman, even if she was only second place on the ticket and agreed with them on no issues. This seems based on typical old white guy assumptions about the narrow, shallow motivations of women and minorities seeking equality in votes and jobs.

Obama’s speech was the only part of the convention my first-week-of-classes self could manage to watch live. It was not quite what I expected, but probably better. Democratic candidates since JFK and RFK have had a tendency to go for the soaring Ted Sorensen rhetoric that never seems to sound right coming out of non-Kennedy-accented, educated-after-the-1940s mouths. Unsurprisingly, most of these Kennedy wannabees did not pan out as national candidates. In a high-flown speech, Obama could never have matched the expectations for ultra-eloquence he has engendered, and he would have fed into the “show horse” meme pushed by the Clinton and McCain forces and the Baby Boomer-dominated media. Instead he came across as very direct and grounded, making the Rovian semi-smears and coded slurs of the past month seem as stupid and counter-productive as they were.

Once again, I found my response to Obama was very personal. His name may not be common in Kansas, but he does sound like a guy from there, and seems to represent the best aspects of the state where I grew up. Perhaps it will not come as a surprise that I tend to identify more with the Free State side of the Kansas tradition — the anti-slavery, pro-education, progressive side — rather than the anti-evolution, homophobic, paleo-Christian side that has been more on display in recent years. Then there’s the generational aspect: my Mom had an early 70s young mother dress just like the one Barack’s mom wears in one of the pictures in the biographical video that was shown; watching the moon landing as a small boy was one of my strong early memories, too; and one of his best lines against McCain was a crappy 70s TV reference. On a more serious level, we finally get a candidate whose outlook was not shaped by the whole coonskin cap to Woodstock to Weather Underground arc that we are all so very tired of hearing about.

I could live without the tax cut bidding war aspect of Obama’s economic plans, featured in the speech and heavily featured in the commercials that have been running during the Cardinals games lately. Yet, as typically New Democrat centrist as the speech was in some ways, it was, as Andrew Sullivan writes, “unashamedly liberal” in others. Obama actually spoke contemptuously of the idea that the market would solve all problems. He copped to the belief that corporations could not necessarily be trusted to work for the good of all without the government placing some limits on their behavior. And now that I think about it, that middle-class tax cut, combined with other proposals, sounds suspiciously like what they used to call a “transfer payment,” down the economic scale for once. Go transfer payments!

This is the first week of classes here, so I hope this will cover up the fact that I really don’t care to watch the national party conventions. I loved them as a kid; it interrupted the reruns and even as late as 1980, unexpected stuff still occasionally happened at the conventions. Or it seemed to. It was kind of a “no Santa Claus” moment for this young politics fan to realize how empty of real decisions or actual information the conventions are. The media finally cottoned on to it, too, only to make matters worse by turning themselves into the political equivalent of Olympic judges — the floor exercises, I guess — minutely but mechanically critiquing the performance of each predetermined movement. (For the record, I gave up the Olympics around 1980, too.) Also, the Democratic Convention coverage suffers from an even worse case of Never-Ending-Sixties & Seventies-itis than John McCain’s foreign policy. Basically the media waits around for something that happened before to happen again: Mayor Daley, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Eagleton, Liberal Avenger Ted Kennedy, anything.

I will catch up with the online videos of some speeches later, but for now let’s recall an actually suspenseful Democratic Convention of 1844, with They Might Be Giants:

Thanks to the earlier commenter who reminded me of this song. It’s not a bad account except for the line about Martin Van Buren being an abolitionist, probably the most positive publicity the Used-Up Man has had in 150 years. The lyrics appear below for the use of other historical rock critics.

They Might Be Giants,
“James K. Polk”

In 1844, the Democrats were split
The three nominees for the presidential candidate
Were Martin Van Buren, a former president and an abolitionist
James Buchanan, a moderate
Lewis Cass, a general and expansionist
From Nashville came a dark horse riding up
He was James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump

Austere, severe, he held few people dear
His oratory filled his foes with fear
The factions soon agreed
“He’s just the man we need
To bring about victory
Fulfill our manifest destiny
And annex the land the Mexicans command”
And when the poll was cast, the winner was
Mister James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump

In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tariffs fell
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term
But precious few have mourned the passing of
Mister James K. Polk, our eleventh president
Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump

Just back from a family trip over the Easter weekend and not feeling terribly well, so blogging may be a bit restricted. So, briefly noted:

• Bill Hogeland makes me feel bad about praising Obama’s take on the Founders the other day, what with me being such a harsh critic of popular authors misusing the Founders. Obama did not misuse anyone, but he did, as Bill argues, present a fairly conventional post-WWII-era patriotic rendition of the founding era. Mostly. The thing is, just to have a major presidential contender acknowledge even the slavery problem is quite an advance, not on public historical discourse as seen in better schools and museums, but on the remarkably retrograde version of everything historical that is typically deployed in presidential politics.

• Robert KC Johnson takes David Greenberg’s defense of Hillary Clinton’s tactics effectively to task. Hillary’s race-baiting and general othering of a serious candidate in her own party is far worse than anything I have seen in a Democratic nomination contest during my lifetime. It is not so much Nixonian as Thurmondesque or Wallace-like.

I am sitting on the floor in a hallway outside a “Science Olympiad” competition at the moment, so please excuse the brevity. I just discovered a newish site called The Democratic Strategist, largely manned by former DLC types, but showing less devotion to doctrinaire anti-liberalism. Today the site had a good post by James Vega taking issue with the common locution “conservative movement,” denoting the network of right-wingers who took over the GOP and brought it to power over the past 45 years. Vega’s major point is that present-day liberal Democrats have a much better claim to “social movement” status, or origins, than GOP conservatives:

The Democratic Party’s economic perspective comes not simply from the legislation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, but from the epic struggle of the American trade union movement in the 1930’s. Equally, at the heart of the modern Democratic Party’s social philosophy lies the historical experience of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Martin Luther King.

These two social movements had three things in common. They were struggles of profoundly disadvantaged and oppressed groups for basic social and economic justice, they were grass-roots, bottom-up movements in which leaders emerged from the rank and file, and they were led by dedicated militants who made huge personal and human sacrifices.

Both trade union and civil right organizers lived with the constant fear of death, vicious beatings, or imprisonment and both movements had many famous martyrs killed in the struggle . . . .

The modern “official” conservative movement on the other hand – although in some respects indeed a social movement – was and is to a significant degree a movement of the “haves” rather than the “have-nots” and as a result has never had any of the three characteristics above.

The modern conservative movement was heavily subsidized by foundations and wealthy individuals from its beginnings. By the 1980’s there was a substantial network of think-tanks, book publishers, house-organ magazines, scholarships and internships that recruited and financially supported young conservatives. Communication with ordinary people was overwhelmingly conducted by very sanitary, “no getting the hands dirty” methods – largely direct mail and television (particularly televangelist programming) – rather than by any actual door-to-door, grass-roots organizing.

Read the rest and the comments.

If there is any problem with this analysis, it lies in the term “social movement” itself. I would have to look up who started using it, but I have always found it is a little too self-valorizing and tendentious, like “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” It claims the mantle of true democracy over whatever the “movement” opposes and makes no allowances for the fact that movements often win and become established institutions, if indeed they weren’t to begin with.

“Movement” is just one of many 1960s -vintage terms and tactics that conservatives have stolen from radicals and liberals, and we might want to consider the fact that the term works better for conservatives despite its inaccuracy. Movement  psychology inevitably privileges demonstrations of ideological commitment over more mundane and concrete accomplishments. In movements, “more radical-than-thou” positions are tough to resist and tend to monopolize the internal prestige and outside media attention available. If you are truly committed to a cause, then deeper commitment almost always looks better and any form of compromise becomes more and more suspect and harder to justify. This radicalization dynamic can be a danger to any movement, but especially to modern liberalism and “progressivism” (Nation-style not Teddy Roosevelt-style). Liberal-progressive solutions to social problems tend to involve building new, ongoing institutions that ultimately require realism and compromise in order to survive and prosper, changes that a movement mentality can rarely accommodate and often resists.

Conservatives just want to smash liberal institutions and blow enough smoke to prevent or reverse social changes that liberal institutions helped bring about. “Movement-”style bombthrowing, to any degree short of crazy Fred Phelps-like behavior, poses no problem for them. They are not building anything.

On a completely different note, I also have my doubts about whether the distinction between “social movements” and other phenomena that tend to take the adjective “political” instead, like parties, are really as clear-cut as sociologists and some historians seem to believe. Seems like to a lot of writers social movement just means “the side of the angels” or “The People.”

Trying not to get too emotionally involved in the Democratic race, without much success, but I will keep a brave face here. It is probably important to remember that yesterday’s results were more or less the same as the polls said after Obama’s last wins. Later, wildly fluctuating insta-polls seem to have given only the appearance of a wildly shifting race. The bottom line in places like Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island (along with parts of Mass, Calif., and other states) seems to be that some working-class Catholics, be they Latinos or “white ethnics” from older immigrant groups, still have a problem with voting for an African-American. Matt Yglesias had a good post on this, with some telling exit-poll data on the voters who made the difference for Clinton:

I guess this should not come as a surprise to those of who have read works like How the Irish Became White and Wages of Whiteness; racism, both incoming and outgoing, seems to be a continuing part of the working-class immigrant experience in this country.

Considering all the other analyses floating around this morning, David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo had a great line about morning-after explanations of political events that I think historians will appreciate:

Like tribal explanations for weather phenomenon, there is a tendency to ascribe cause and effect based on proximity of events. This is especially true among political reporters and TV people. The ads they run, the events they report, the insiders they talk to must be what propels voters: Muskie was sunk by his tears. Dukakis by Willie Horton. Kerry by Swift Boaters. Vast sociological storm systems reduced to a sound bite or a highlight reel.

Small universe alert: I never knew this until after many months of reading him as the mysterious “TPM Reader DK,” but David and I not only both live in Columbia effing Missouri, but go to the same church!

If Hillary Clinton wins Ohio tonight because of her allegedly tougher stance on NAFTA, it will be a little thick, as Bertie Wooster likes to say. Sure, the Obama staff’s Canadian misadventure did not look good, but this is the wife of the president who brought in NAFTA and counted it as a centerpiece of his economic policy. Hillary pretty much has to count her First Lady years to win the “experience” crown over Obama, but she does not seem to count NAFTA. Too bad Clintonian neoliberal political economy makes little sense without it. 

“Free trade” is an issue I am a little unsettled on myself, but if I were an Ohio voter, I would not be counting on any of this year’s candidates to significantly scale back NAFTA, least of all the Dems. Free trade in the sense of anti-protectionism is one of the Democratic party’s most long-consistent positions, something that Jefferson, Van Buren, Bryan, Wilson, Kennedy (I think), Carter, and B. Clinton all had in common.  Protectionism was a key reason industrial Ohio voted GOP all those decades, back when protection was seen as aid to corporations rather than workers, and half of the presidents were Ohio Republicans. I appeal to specialists: has there been a seriously protectionist Democratic president or major presidential candidate? Were FDR or Truman exceptions?