I have voted in every congressional and presidential race since 1964, when I voted for Lyndon Johnson, having been too young to vote for JFK in 1960, however much I was hyped up for him, particularly taken with his patrician charm and that of his wife at the time of the Democratic Convention even though I had previously been a supporter for a third nomination of Adlai Stevenson and distrusted the right wing contacts and anti-FDR positions of his father. I couldn’t vote at that time because the voting age was 21 until it was reduced by constitutional amendment to 18 in response to young men having been drafted to fight the war in Vietnam. I was inspired by a telethon (really a radiothon) I heard during the campaign of 1948 where the broadcaster told of a couple that drove a hundred miles to a polling station so that they could vote with one spouse voting Democratic and the other Republican, and so canceling one another out, but both having participated in the electoral process. I still take that ideal seriously. Voting shows citizens have agency, that we the people empower the government, whether wisely or not. I still think that the best way to deal with the lingering of Trump is not with the courts or lawsuits or Congress but in having the people he supports soundly defeated in November.
Not that 1948, which is the start of my political consciousness, was such a wonderful year. The Dixiecrats ran as segregationists and took a number of Southern states, a situation that continues to this day, just the southern states now called Republican and still trying to keep people of color from voting. The Cold War had started as Chirchill had chronicled in his Iron Curtin speech in 1947 and the Soviet Union would explode an atomic bomb a year later. And America had fallen into amnesia forgetting that the Soviets were our allies against the Nazis and finding fault with those “premature anti-Fascists” as Lefties humerously said about themselves. But, after all Soviet spies were being discovered, and especially Alger Hiss, a person in high places. I remember H. B. Koltenborn say on election night in 1948 that Dewey had likely won and I, like Harry Truman, went to bed also thinking so and learned otherwise the next morning, which was a good thing, Truman in his full term created NATO, and went into Korea and integrated the armed forces. However, his domestic agenda, the Fair Deal, was overly ambitious. Truman wanted not only a minimum wage but also national health insurance and no discrimination in housing, Truman’s achievements were more and more recognized in the ensuing years. Quite a legacy for a guy who constantly failed at life before he found politics as an associate of a political machine.
So I mailed in my voting registration form in Utah last week and will be able to vote by mail or in a drop box. I think Utah voting is reliable, even if I am not at all sure that Georgia and Texas will not fudge the elections for the Republicans. That makes the crisis of 2022 more dangerous to the American system than was the case in 1948, though there are eerie echoes of my first Presidential election season in the congressional election now soon to take place. It isn’t just that racism has learned not to call it by that name. It is the instant amnesia similar to the time of the Red Menace about what it was to storm the Capital less than two years ago and so dismiss the only insurrection in the history of the nation, Lee never getting to the U. S. Capitol, but these Insurrectionists have done so, only the small fry getting prosecuted now two years later. It is also a populace failing to appreciate the significance of the changes Biden has brought about, such as but not only trying to transition cars from internal combustion to electric cars without disrupting the economy. It was like the management of the New York Yankees not pausing a few years to restock their teams and then try a new attempt at winning the pennant. America, like the Yankees, are expected to rebuild while still expanding. No lapses; no pauses. No wonder China wonders how America does it. Biden, like Truman, was surefooted even though opponents treated both as blunderers. And Biden has been, remarkably so, successful in getting through a passel of legislation even when the Senate is all but tie, perhaps by sticking to his notion that the old fashioned idea of legislative logrolling still seems to work. Biden got Sinema and Manchin on board that way.
There is another way to see the similarities between Truman and Biden, the current President, also someone from whom not much was expected. He had a long history as a Senate insider who only did get bills enacted when they were safe, such as in the act against violence for women, just as Truman gained favor for investigating corruption in the World War II war industries. Biden catered to what the leadership required, as that silly but damaging sort of investigation of Anita Hill, Biden required by George Michell the majority leader to do something to quell women’s outrage and so concocted or just supervised a very limited scope of inquiry,. No investigation of background, only a few interviews with interested parties. Once Truman became President, he assiduously took care of business, which is the business of the nation, which was to deal with issues rather than distractions. He wasn’t interested in petty squabbles because the dignity of the presidency precluded doing that. Sure, it is fun to tease Truman about having gone outside the Wjhite House gates so as to post a letter to a Washington newspaper music critic who had disparaged his daughter, Margaret, for a recital she had given. An example endearing because it was Truman as a person rather than a President who was piqued by a father and so legitimate. More important was that Dean Acheson was filled with tears because he had told Truman that Acheson could not disown Alger Hiss even though Hiss was a spy because they had been friends for many years and Truman said that was alright and that he himself, as President, had attended the funeral of Tom Pendergast, the Kansas City boss who had mentored Truman and had gotten into criminal trouble. Remember, this was the time of redbaiting and would likely cost Democrats for Acheson not to flail the corpse. Truman spent every day not sweating the little stuff but dealing with international affairs and economic and civil rights issues, castigating the 1946 Republican led Congress for a Do Nothing Congress even though the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by them had significantly restricted the ability of labor to engage in collective bargaining.
Biden also places himself above the give and take of politics. He has left the handling of Trump entirely to the Justice Department even if he regards and has said that there is a fight going on for the soul of the nation and was motivated to run in 2020 because of the Charlottesville demonstrations where Trump said that there were good people on both sides rather than to denounce the clearly racist and antisemitism of the demonstrators. Biden works on decreasing inflation, getting lower drug prices and converting the nation to electric automobiles, quite an accomplishment, as I say, all by itself. Biden takes the high road even if Republicans think he is high handed to say that a portion of Republicans have become semi-fascistic. What else can be said otherwise about a party engaged in the Big Lie and trying by violence to overthrow the government? Biden remains confident that the ordinary political processes of legislative accomodation and expertise and careful staffwork will allow him to make his administration prevail and become recognized as successful, just as Harry Truman did. Even if Biden is, at the moment, not very popular, just as was the case when Truman was making his own most deliberate and consequential decisions.
Biden going slow and steady and taking the high ground is not just a contrast to the previous administration, which was not particularly classy or accomplished more than to satisfy its donor class. It was that Trump never occurred to take the high road rather than to just find ways to make himself richer-- or at least pay off some of his debts by having Saudis pay hotel fees at his Washington hotel. In fact, just satisfying donors has been the modus vivendi of all Republican administrations at least since Bush ‘41, who would say anything the donors wanted him to say on domestic affairs, such as “no new taxes'' when he had previously decried “voodoo economics” when Reagan proposed it but disowned it when he became the vice presidential nominee. All George H. W. Bush wanted was to have a free hand in foreign policy which was supposedly his strong suit, though he never figured out how to get out of Iraq once he had won a lightning war there. So the present GOP is made up of Trumpites and the supposedly sane or moderate republicans like McConnell who says nothing but also have no policy but obstructionism. It is up to the voters to say that Republicans decrying inflation is not to further a policy that will decrease it.