Michael Barone: Bush, Clinton, Bush--Clinton? It sounds like the War of the Roses.
Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. It sounds like the Wars of the Roses: Lancaster, York, Lancaster, York.
To compare our political struggles to the conflicts between rival dynasties may be carrying it too far. But we have become, I think, a nation that is less small-r republican and more royalist than it used to be. Viscerally, this strikes me as a bad thing. But as I've thought about it, I've decided that something can be said for the increasing royalism of our politics. And whether you like it or not, you can't deny it's there. Not when the wife of the 42nd president is a leading candidate to succeed the 43rd president who in turn is the son of the 41st president. The two George Bushes are referred to in their family, we are told, as 41 and 43. If Hillary Clinton wins, will she and her husband call each other 42 and 44?
Evidence for my case comes from the recent set-to in the White House press room after reporters had learned that Laura Bush had made no public announcement when she had a skin cancer routinely removed. When Press Secretary Tony Snow said it was a private matter, reporters spun out theories why Mrs. Bush had a duty to disclose this minor surgery to the American public--even though she is not a public official and even though the operation had no impact on the operation of government. But reporters instinctively sense that the doings of Mrs. Bush are as newsworthy as their British counterparts regard those of the royal family. And they have some reason to. Her husband started just about every campaign speech by praising his decision to "marry up." Her high approval ratings take some of the edge off his low ones.
"Royalty," wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 book "The English Constitution," "is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated in one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting things." He went on to note that the Monarchy (his capitals) was not just one person but several. "A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It also brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life." So we have columnists writing that the current president's policies are a sort of oedipal rebellion against his father. And we have endless speculations on the dynamics of the Clintons' relationship. The personal has become the political. In Bagehot's England they were separate: The Monarchy was personal, the Palmerstons and Gladstones and Disraelis political. Now political reporters are getting ready to grind out pieces about the families of the 2008 presidential candidates.
There was always a risk of royalism under our Constitution, with the president both head of government and head of state. But for a long time politicians struggled against it. George Washington turned down a crown. John Adams did not make public the scintillating intellect of his wife Abigail. For half the time in the first 40 years of the 19th century there was no first lady at all: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were widowers when they took office. After the Civil War, politics revolved so much around parties rather than presidents--can you name all the presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt?--that in the 1880s the future President Woodrow Wilson wrote a book called "Congressional Government."
The drift toward royalism is a 20th-century phenomenon. At first it was concealed. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had strong-willed, intelligent wives and broods of children who went on to impressive achievements. But they didn't make much of this public. Woodrow Wilson's first wife, a Southerner who died early in his presidency, reportedly pushed for racial segregation in federal building cafeterias, while his second wife effectively ran the White House while he was incapacitated by a stroke--neither something you'd want to talk about even now. Lou Henry Hoover, an engineering school classmate of her husband, directed her public energies to promoting the Girl Scouts. With Eleanor Roosevelt, we come to the first first lady with a political identity of her own. But she was just one of many courtiers in her husband's White House, and not necessarily the most influential....
Read entire article at WSJ
To compare our political struggles to the conflicts between rival dynasties may be carrying it too far. But we have become, I think, a nation that is less small-r republican and more royalist than it used to be. Viscerally, this strikes me as a bad thing. But as I've thought about it, I've decided that something can be said for the increasing royalism of our politics. And whether you like it or not, you can't deny it's there. Not when the wife of the 42nd president is a leading candidate to succeed the 43rd president who in turn is the son of the 41st president. The two George Bushes are referred to in their family, we are told, as 41 and 43. If Hillary Clinton wins, will she and her husband call each other 42 and 44?
Evidence for my case comes from the recent set-to in the White House press room after reporters had learned that Laura Bush had made no public announcement when she had a skin cancer routinely removed. When Press Secretary Tony Snow said it was a private matter, reporters spun out theories why Mrs. Bush had a duty to disclose this minor surgery to the American public--even though she is not a public official and even though the operation had no impact on the operation of government. But reporters instinctively sense that the doings of Mrs. Bush are as newsworthy as their British counterparts regard those of the royal family. And they have some reason to. Her husband started just about every campaign speech by praising his decision to "marry up." Her high approval ratings take some of the edge off his low ones.
"Royalty," wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 book "The English Constitution," "is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated in one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting things." He went on to note that the Monarchy (his capitals) was not just one person but several. "A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It also brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life." So we have columnists writing that the current president's policies are a sort of oedipal rebellion against his father. And we have endless speculations on the dynamics of the Clintons' relationship. The personal has become the political. In Bagehot's England they were separate: The Monarchy was personal, the Palmerstons and Gladstones and Disraelis political. Now political reporters are getting ready to grind out pieces about the families of the 2008 presidential candidates.
There was always a risk of royalism under our Constitution, with the president both head of government and head of state. But for a long time politicians struggled against it. George Washington turned down a crown. John Adams did not make public the scintillating intellect of his wife Abigail. For half the time in the first 40 years of the 19th century there was no first lady at all: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were widowers when they took office. After the Civil War, politics revolved so much around parties rather than presidents--can you name all the presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt?--that in the 1880s the future President Woodrow Wilson wrote a book called "Congressional Government."
The drift toward royalism is a 20th-century phenomenon. At first it was concealed. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had strong-willed, intelligent wives and broods of children who went on to impressive achievements. But they didn't make much of this public. Woodrow Wilson's first wife, a Southerner who died early in his presidency, reportedly pushed for racial segregation in federal building cafeterias, while his second wife effectively ran the White House while he was incapacitated by a stroke--neither something you'd want to talk about even now. Lou Henry Hoover, an engineering school classmate of her husband, directed her public energies to promoting the Girl Scouts. With Eleanor Roosevelt, we come to the first first lady with a political identity of her own. But she was just one of many courtiers in her husband's White House, and not necessarily the most influential....