A political icon always makes for a fun column and that observation rings true in two recent columns in the Boston Globe. On October 18 Hardball host Chris Matthews delivered a love letter to Tip O’Neill. By gosh, if only our leaders could halt the enmity at 6:00 PM and enjoy a belt like Tip and Ronald Reagan! On October 20 Jeff Jacoby flawlessly carried out his job description of annoying the region’s liberals by attempting to appropriate John F. Kennedy as a conservative hero.
Nice try, Chris and Jeff. But hero worship is way off base.
Pundits like to personalize politics because individuals make for compelling stories. Political scientists enjoy individual dramas too but pay at least as much attention to ideas, interests and institutions because they are usually far more telling than dramatic tales of individual derring-do.
For example, Matthews writes that “All those hours of social time between the liberal speaker and the conservative president, all the shared birthday parties and over-the-top Irish toasts, all the Saint Patrick’s Days spent together, served to keep open the lines of communication.”
Well, sure. But consider that in the Eighties the parties were not as polarized as they are now. When Reagan took office in 1981 his Democratic adversary was leading a caucus that included 50 or so moderate and conservative Democrats – the “boll weevils” who denied Tip a real majority and even imperiled his speakership, should conservative southerners turn against him (shades of John Boehner and the Tea Party). In Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, John A. Farrell writes that O’Neill was a patriot who honored the people’s decision on Election Day and honestly wished to give the president a chance after the failures of presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. On the other hand Reagan was not hamstrung by an anti-government cabal in his own party. He sat unchallenged atop the conservative movement (which, to bait Jacoby a bit, would seem positively moderate today).
As for ideas, the New Deal liberalism of O’Neill is far from dominant in the DLC party of the Clintons or the Wall Street coddling party of Obama. Reagan did not have to deal with the extremism of the Tea Party or moneyed interests which have proven they can so manipulate a party primary as to displace Indiana’s Richard Lugar with the bizarrely right wing Richard Mourdock.
Yes, the unique capabilities of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill counted but so did institutions, ideas, and interests.
As for Jacoby, he really did an excellent job in riling the area’s liberals, several of whom published fine letters to the editor pointing out Jacoby’s lack of attention to context. Jacoby was right that Kennedy was in some ways more conservative than modern liberals like to remember. So how did JFK get mismatched with the liberal political party (where he would feel pressure from its liberal interests) when he could have comfortably cuddled with the party of conservatism, the Republican Party?
Immigration.
Kennedy was the descendant of immigrants; in fact, the Boston elites’ most despised immigrants, the Irish (surpassed perhaps by the modern GOP’s obsession with Mexicans). When JFK came along a Massachusetts Democrat could be conservative. On social and civil rights issues the Massachusetts Republican Party was more liberal than the Democrats. A conservative, yes; but there was one thing an ambitious Irish Catholic politician could not be in Massachusetts, and that was a Republican. In terms of partisan institutions, that put Kennedy in the liberal party.
On immigration the Massachusetts GOP fell in behind its leader Henry Cabot Lodge, who spent much of his career defending the city upon a hill against the invasion of the inferior races. Cabot Lodge was one Republican who did not want immigrants and children of immigrants voting. There is nothing new under the sun.
Yes in politics individuals and their relationships matter. But don’t forget ideas, institutions, and interests.
