"But they have a new group of leaders that I think is, uh, actually I think they're smarter. I think they're very smart. I think they're far less radicalized."

"And I think they're, uh, I think they're really good. They love their country. You know, you talk about regime change, nobody will say that. But I guess that's, look, their one set of leaders is all gone. Their second set of leaders is all gone. Their third set of leaders a little bit gone. But for the most part, and frankly, I think that's regime change. I think they're going to behave much differently. I think they see a different way of life that they were never exposed to. So the one thing I didn't want to see is I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. But all I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship. It never went down. They didn't like it. The people, you know, the stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including the people on the stage, other than me, of course.... What do you think, Scott? Is the stock market more brilliant than you?... And, uh, every time we said something amazing like we're going to settle, it would go up. And every time we said something negative like — guess what? — we're not going to be able to settle. It would go down.... And the one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. I didn't want that. And who knows what would have happened, but bad things happen. ..."

Herbert Hoover takes a strong position against retirement.

My son Chris sends that excerpt from "Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times" (commission earned).

American history question of the day.

In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?

I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...



... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:

I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.

In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.

Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.

Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."

I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:

After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...

As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

"Hillary Clinton did everything right in this campaign, and she won more votes than her opponent did. She won."

"She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed* for even one more second. Instead, she will be decorated as an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House. Let that revolting president-elect be Millard Fillmore or Herbert Hoover or whatever. Hillary is Athena."

The last lines of Virginia Heffernan's "Hillary Clinton Is More Than a President/She is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself."

Didn't anyone ever teach you not to idolize political leaders? I find that deification pretty damned funny after all the times I heard Trump supporters reviled for wanting an autocrat.

Anyway, Herbert Hoover? Are you saying you'll be delighted if the country ends up in some Great-Depression-like predicament?

I know Ms. Heffernan thinks she's amusing and she's trying to cheer up a basket of depressives. But really, you ought to be ashamed to love a political figure so much, and if you're not, I've got no sympathy for the pain you feel as you witness Trump receiving adoration from those of your fellow citizens who are ecstatic about the results of the last election.

_______________________

* "I ain’t lookin’ to... Analyze you, categorize you/Finalize you or advertise you/All I really want to do/Is, baby, be friends with you...." — Bob Dylan lyric that independently occurred to both Meade and me on reading that text.

CBS doesn't know the difference between J. Edgar Hoover and Herbert Hoover.

Today's "Face the Nation" had host Bob Shieffer interviewing Philip Shenon, author of "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination." At one point, Shenon was talking about a memo FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the Warren Commission. Check out the ludicrous graphic at 0:21:



That's not J. Edgar Hoover! That's President Herbert Hoover!



Oh, journalism! What has become of you?

"Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character."

"America, at its best, matches a commitment to principle with a concern for civility. A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness... We must live up to the calling we share. Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is a way to shared accomplishment."

Who said that? Did he get what he asked for?

ADDED: I got to that quote through a New Republic article written at the time of the Obama inauguration that had the teaser-title "Screw Civility: Why Bush-Bashing Should Be Obama's Eeelection Strategy." The link goes to my blogging about it (which riffs on the misspelling "eeelection"). Anyway, check out the advice the lofty news journal gave to Obama:

Obama should save the civility shtick for Republicans he'll have to work with. As for the guy retiring to Texas, the new administration should ensure he remains the useful foil he was during the 2008 campaign. That starts with letting nothing--not public amnesia, not nostalgia, and certainly not a statesmanlike gesture from the White House--lift him from the PR cellar. When the new crew opens up the books on Bush's government, they ought to let every embarrassing detail out....

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for decades; Republicans kicked around Jimmy Carter for a dozen years. If Bush's successors play their cards right, Democrats could use his legacy as a thumb on their side of the scale for a generation....

Civility shtick. Mmm hmm. Use it when it's useful. Don't be a chump.

"They lost! Losers compromise!... They were wiped out!"

Rush is raging this morning. Message: The GOP must be boldly conservative and not compromise.

ADDED: Emailed notes from the Rush organization, summarizing the first segment:

LOSERS compromise; Winners compromise nothing!  ((Beach Music: Wipe Out))  ((More Music:  Ding, Dong;   the Witch is Dead.))  It is amusing how pessimism surrounds me.  When Obama had the House and the Senate, that was a reason to be pessimistic, and I wasn’t.

Conservatism was not on the ballot in 2008.  Now we see.  1994 was BIG because it was unexpected;  the win last night was expected.  Republicans hoped to pick up 17 and they picked up 60.  Compromise is off the table;  they didn’t want to compromise with us. Losers compromise; this Agenda has to be stopped!

60 seats in the House of Representatives is almost unprecedented.
The previous record was 55 seats in 1932 when Hoover was tossed.
((More oldie-but-goodie-music that Rush loves, this time with satire lyrics.))

And it’s bye, bye, Pelosi and Republican Boehner takes the gravel. 

As long as the Democrats control the Senate, what better face than Dingy Harry to represent them.  The country is asking, “How in the Heck can this happen, other than unions, fraud, and deceit?”  Chuck-U Schumer is unhappy and mad-as-Hell that he doesn’t get the gravel.  He and Dick Turbin were going to have a drag-out battle for it.

AND: Here's the full text of the opening monologue.

David Brooks: "Liberal Suicide March."

Okay! I've been mocking David Brooks lately, and, frankly, I haven't even read this column yet, but I've got to get in on this "Liberal Suicide March" action. Link!

They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

Ah! Must begin by trashing the GOP. See, the Repubs have already done a suicide march. Now, it's time for the Dems to go:

It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America.

It's all about interesting. The question is: Does the news amuse me?

That’s because the plotline is exactly the same.

Suicide is so last year.

The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.

(I'm distracted by mixed metaphors. Insular/coasts. Cherry-picking/cocoon.)

Brooks goes on to identify 3 stages of the liberal suicide march, and I think it's glaringly obvious that what the liberals are doing is disastrous and destructive in a way that is utterly different from the Republicans continued adherence to conservative philosophy. Conservatism was only unpopular, and it could become popular again, especially after we've seen the liberal philosophy acted out in real life:

First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.

Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

This is suicide. I say: Hurry up and die.

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.

Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.

Ugh! I flash back on a post I wrote last October, October 30th, a few days before I voted for Obama, "With the Democratic control of Congress, how much traction should McCain get out of the argument for divided government?" Here's the whole text of that post, with boldface and bracketed commentary added:

TNR presents the debate. On Monday, John B. Judis had a piece in called "Down with Divided Government," and today, we get a response from Jacob T. Levy: "In Defense of Two-Party Rule."

This is a huge question for me, and I've wavered on the subject. Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know.

Aaaaggghhhhh! Interesting. Save me from interesting!

And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation.

So, that's how my thinking about 2-party rule has supported my decision to vote for Obama.

Now, let's see what Judis and Levy say. Judis notes various examples of successful presidencies under united government and bad presidencies with divided government, and says the evidence proves that "divided government is a curse, not a blessing, and should be avoided, if at all possible." He elaborates:

[In "The Politics Presidents Make" Stephen] Skowronek, a Yale political scientist, distinguishes two kinds of circumstances that have led to crippled government. In the first, a president from an opposing party, but who nevertheless represents the wave of the political future, confronts a congress wedded to the past and determined to frustrate him. You could put Nixon (who was the harbinger of an emerging Republican majority) and Clinton (who was the harbinger of an emerging Democratic majority) in this group. Both these presidencies degenerated into chaos in their second terms.

Then, there are presidents who, in Skowronek’s words, are “affiliated with a set of established commitments that have in the course of events been called into question as failed or irrelevant responses to the problems of the day.” Skowroneck numbers among these James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. These presidents don’t necessarily have to contend with a Congressional opposition in power, but like Hoover and Carter in their last two years, with a nascent and growing opposition in Congress that constitutes a functional majority in opposition to what they want to do. These presidencies have also proved disastrous.

A John McCain presidency would clearly fall in the latter group, and McCain, unlike Hoover and Carter, would have to face clear and unequivocal majorities in Congress united against him. Rather than promising success, that kind of divided government would promise chaos and failure.

Levy says:

The simple fact is that Republicans never controlled the House during Reagan's eight years....

The last six years of Clinton's presidency, 1995 to 2001, is the other era of divided government that gets held up as exemplary. Judis dismisses it as catastrophic on the basis of the Clinton impeachment. But that misses the wonderful weirdness of the late '90s. The chaos of impeachment coexisted alongside bipartisan legislative accomplishments... Again, I think a good president was made better through divided government....

But he's still not promoting McCain:

The obvious prediction is that Obama will have at least two years of one-party government. That may be, temporarily, for the best--the Bush-era Republican Party, like the Nixon-era Republican Party, needs some time in the wilderness to unlearn some very bad habits. ... [I]n the unlikely event that a healthier, reformed Republican Party is ready by 2010 and able to grab back control of the House, so much the better for American politics--and maybe so much the better for Obama's presidency. And in the meantime, I'm certainly rooting for smart and decent Hill Republicans (admittedly a minority) to hold onto their seats to lead the rebuilding toward another era of soundly divided government.

I don't know if undivided government is always better, but I think it can have some benefits now, and it's not so obviously always bad that opposition to it works as an especially strong reason to support McCain in 2008.

We'll never know what McCain might have done. He'd have made his own mistakes, and I won't assume he would have stood up to Congress.

And I cling to the belief that Obama has the ability to save us from the destructive path Congress has chosen for itself. But will he use it?

How much of an ideologue is he anyway? We've come this far, and still we don't really know. Is he, at heart, the committed leftist his staunchest opponents say he is? I know Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying — over and over — that Obama is intentionally destroying the economy (so that nothing will be left for us but socialism).

I still think Obama is a pragmatist. I also think he's mainly interested in attaining personal glory. If that's right, the prospect of his own defeat in 2012 should shock him into standing up to the bunch of Democrats who — I hope and I hope he sees — will be crushed in 2010.

So: hope and change. Come on, Obama. We need some now.

With the Democratic control of Congress, how much traction should McCain get out of the argument for divided government?

TNR presents the debate. On Monday, John B. Judis had a piece in called "Down with Divided Government," and today, we get a response from Jacob T. Levy: "In Defense of Two-Party Rule."

This is a huge question for me, and I've wavered on the subject. Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know. And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation.

So, that's how my thinking about 2-party rule has supported my decision to vote for Obama.

Now, let's see what Judis and Levy say. Judis notes various examples of successful presidencies under united government and bad presidencies with divided government, and says the evidence proves that "divided government is a curse, not a blessing, and should be avoided, if at all possible." He elaborates:

[In "The Politics Presidents Make" Stephen] Skowronek, a Yale political scientist, distinguishes two kinds of circumstances that have led to crippled government. In the first, a president from an opposing party, but who nevertheless represents the wave of the political future, confronts a congress wedded to the past and determined to frustrate him. You could put Nixon (who was the harbinger of an emerging Republican majority) and Clinton (who was the harbinger of an emerging Democratic majority) in this group. Both these presidencies degenerated into chaos in their second terms.

Then, there are presidents who, in Skowronek’s words, are “affiliated with a set of established commitments that have in the course of events been called into question as failed or irrelevant responses to the problems of the day.” Skowroneck numbers among these James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. These presidents don’t necessarily have to contend with a Congressional opposition in power, but like Hoover and Carter in their last two years, with a nascent and growing opposition in Congress that constitutes a functional majority in opposition to what they want to do. These presidencies have also proved disastrous.

A John McCain presidency would clearly fall in the latter group, and McCain, unlike Hoover and Carter, would have to face clear and unequivocal majorities in Congress united against him. Rather than promising success, that kind of divided government would promise chaos and failure.

Levy says:

The simple fact is that Republicans never controlled the House during Reagan's eight years....

The last six years of Clinton's presidency, 1995 to 2001, is the other era of divided government that gets held up as exemplary. Judis dismisses it as catastrophic on the basis of the Clinton impeachment. But that misses the wonderful weirdness of the late '90s. The chaos of impeachment coexisted alongside bipartisan legislative accomplishments... Again, I think a good president was made better through divided government....

But he's still not promoting McCain:

The obvious prediction is that Obama will have at least two years of one-party government. That may be, temporarily, for the best--the Bush-era Republican Party, like the Nixon-era Republican Party, needs some time in the wilderness to unlearn some very bad habits. ... [I]n the unlikely event that a healthier, reformed Republican Party is ready by 2010 and able to grab back control of the House, so much the better for American politics--and maybe so much the better for Obama's presidency. And in the meantime, I'm certainly rooting for smart and decent Hill Republicans (admittedly a minority) to hold onto their seats to lead the rebuilding toward another era of soundly divided government.

I don't know if undivided government is always better, but I think it can have some benefits now, and it's not so obviously always bad that opposition to it works as an especially strong reason to support McCain in 2008.

Has Justice Scalia “compromised his impartiality" by going duck hunting with Dick Cheney?

Jeffrey Rosen marshalls the evidence of Justices hanging out with Presidents: Harlan Fiske Stone played medicine ball with Herbert Hoover, Robert H. Jackson attended an intimate dinner celebrating FDR’s wedding anniversary, William O. Douglas played poker with FDR, etc.

But that was the old-style “model for male bonding between justices and presidents,” according to Rosen. After Watergate, he writes, "Washington became more adversarial":

Socializing among justices, executive officials and litigants continues, but on increasingly wary terms. Consider the unspoken rules of one of Washington's most exclusive poker games, which has included Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and lawyers like Robert S. Bennett and Leonard Garment, the former Nixon counselor. Mr. Garment said that during the months he had a case pending before the court, he stayed away from the game. He lamented the growing concern for appearances, and insisted there is nothing wrong with litigants socializing with justices as long as they don't discuss pending cases. "If we can't trust justices to behave appropriately, and force them to live in a bubble," Mr. Garment said, "we can forget about the ability of a court appropriately to reflect a changing culture."

Even though Rosen doesn't think Cheney and Scalia talked about pending cases when they went duck hunting, he worries that justices are too isolated from the political sphere, especially from having informal contacts with politicians of different viewpoints. Rosen makes a big leap here, speculating that "the growing isolation between justices and politicians" is causing the Court to "treat the president and Congress as unruly schoolchildren rather than coordinate branches of government."

Presumably, Rosen is referring to the Court's enforcement of constitutional limits on the commerce power and on the power to legislate to remedy violations of Fourteenth Amendment rights. The NYT reader is expected to assume that these cases he's obliquely referring to are outrageously high-handed. There isn't room in this piece to seriously examine whether perhaps the judicial branch is simply taking its own role seriously, rather than disrespecting the other branches. Even if the Court has reined in other branches in some of these cases, that doesn't mean it has treated them like "unruly schoolchildren." It may simply mean that it has treated them as what they are, human beings engaged in the exercise of vast political power, tempted to undervalue the constitutional limitations that stand in their way.

Stronger doses of real political life don't seem likely to cure that perception.