Archive: Opinions

Dan's essay in today's (Jully 22) Star makes it sound as though bitter pettiness and incivility are new in American politics, but, in fact, such tooth-and-nail bickering among candidates and their supporters goes back to the earliest days of the Republic.

I'm not a scholar of American presidential politics, but most of what I read is biographies of presidents and other prominent political figures in history.  I have just put down the Dorothy Kearns Goodwin's 'Bully Pulpit' about Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft and the muckraking journalists of the early 20th Century.  After decades of close friendship and after Roosevelt's having groomed Taft for national politics, these two buddies waged a bitter, mudslinging fight first for the Republican nomination and then for the presidency, when an imbittered TR launched the Bull Moose Party.  It cost the GOP the presidency and gave it to an inferior cadidate in Wilson.

And, in the politically aware lifetimes at least of Dan and me, can we forget the dirty tricks campaigns of 'Tricky Dick' Nixon, of Reagan's promises to Iran that deep-sixed Jimmy Carter--the most if not the only gentlemanly cadidate in recent history.  And we could go on and on, all the way to the bitter shenanigans of Jefferson and Adams after god-like Washington passed the torch.  

Oh, and then there were Hamilton and Burr, only one of whom sought a presidency, but whose rancor and hatred toward each other had a particularly grisley outcome.

Incivility in American politics is certainly nothing new.

Tom Vawter
Lansing, NY
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