History News Network

Democratic Party

Originally published 06/03/2013
NJ's Frank Lautenberg dead at 89, last WWII vet in Senate

Frank R. Lautenberg, a long-serving lawmaker, successful businessman and the last actively serving veteran of World War II in the U.S. Senate, is dead at age 89 due to complications from viral pneumonia.The Senator's office released a statement with news of his passing Monday morning.Lautenberg, a Democrat and the oldest sitting Senator, died Monday morning at 4:02 a.m. at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital. He had been sick for some time and his last appearance on Capitol Hill had been in a wheel chair.A fixture on Capitol Hill, Lautenberg was the last in a long line of World War II veterans to serve in the U.S. Senate and he held the record for the number of votes cast by a New Jersey Senator. Those votes spanned two senate careers. Lautenberg was first elected in 1982 and served until a first retirement in 2000....

Originally published 04/01/2013
Robert W. Merry: The GOP Can Survive Its Iraq Wounds

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. His most recent book is Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.A passel of punditry has emerged recently questioning whether the Republican Party will soon recover from the foreign-policy incompetence of the George W. Bush presidency. Some pundits foresee a long period of eclipse before the party will recapture the full confidence of the American people, so seared have they been by the U.S. fiasco in Iraq and the ongoing muddle in Afghanistan. Thus, in this view, the GOP’s fate is set—a long winter of minority-party status.

Originally published 03/28/2013
James T. Kloppenberg: The 2012 Election And The Future of The Parties

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in History and Humanities from Stanford and has held fellowships from the Danforth, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His 2010 book Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition explores Obama’s political philosophy and commitment to democratic deliberation.The election of 2012 is behind us. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have completed their last campaigns and given their final victory and concession speeches.It is time to reflect on the persistent themes that characterized the campaign and locate the election in relation to the parties’ trajectories in recent years. Identifying those themes might explain, better than pundits’ fascination with demography or with politics as a game of imagery and maneuver, the reasons why the president was reelected by a larger margin than many analysts predicted.

Originally published 03/21/2013
Nixon mocked Democrats for calling Jerusalem Israel’s capital; now both parties agree on that

WASHINGTON — Last year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked the Democratic convention platform for its “shameful” decision to omit a reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But in a sign of how U.S. politics have changed in 40 years, President Richard Nixon complained in 1972 of the Democrats’ ”dishonest” platform language declaring the city Israel’s capital.Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, agreed with his condemnation during a previously unreported taped conversation from June 29, 1972. “To make Jerusalem the capital of Israel is not the platform of a major American national party,” Henry Kissinger told Nixon. “That is what I find so revolting here.” The tape is one of a collection housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.On Wednesday, Barack Obama arrived in Israel for his first visit there as president — about six months after telling Democratic Party officials to reinstate language from previous convention platforms stating Jerusalem is the Israeli capital....