Voting and Waiting

The first time was 1948. I was 24 and had fought in a war, but the voting age was 21 then, and I cast my first ballot for Harry Truman, a centrist choice between Republican Thomas E. Dewey ("the little man on the wedding cake," Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice had dubbed him) and the liberal Henry Wallace, who had been Truman's vice president before being dumped from the ticket.

Clare Boothe Luce had pronounced Truman a "gone goose," but the man from Missouri ran a "Give 'em hell, Harry" campaign and won the White House after serving more than three years there in the wake of FDR's death in 1945.

All this ancient history comes back to mind today after my sixteenth vote for a president (more often for a loser than not, thanks to the Bushes) and recalls the range of emotions on Election Days for someone who believes politics really matters.

The two Eisenhower victories were days of resignation, even though I had been a volunteer speech writer for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. In the next decade, to my surprise, I learned to "like Ike" very much.

In the nail-biter between JFK and Nixon in 1960, I went to an afternoon movie to make the time pass but, even so, had to stay up all night to get the final result. It was worth it.

But in 1968, after working for Eugene McCarthy to try to end the war in Vietnam and being tear-gassed at the Democratic convention, I voted but refused to campaign for Hubert Humphrey and regretted my "purism" when Nixon won by less than one percent and went on to give us Watergate.

Since then, Election Days and Nights blur together except for 2000, and the less said and thought about that the better.

Today will be long and hard, but age has taught me to be patient, even in the face of an historic moment I never believed I would live to see. But, as in 1960, the waiting will be worth it.

A Platoon of Coaches for McCain

Of all the contrasts between the two presidential candidates--political philosophy, age, race--the most glaring, as we saw this week, may be rhetorical.

Barack Obama is a masterful public speaker. John McCain, to put it kindly, is not.

Describing him as "a guy who has never really learned how to read a teleprompter," Gail Collins parses McCain's Tuesday night performance:

“'I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas,'” McCain said. Pause. Smile. McCain has only a couple of versions of smile. And for speeches, he tends to employ a kind of scary, humorless teeth-baring.

“'He doesn’t trust us to make decisions for ourselves and wants the government to make them for us. And that’s not change we can believe in.' Pause. Smile. It was Pavlovian, really, as if some handler had run McCain through his paces over and over, administering an electric shock each time he ended a sentence without revealing his dental work."

That is certainly why McCain's campaign has challenged Obama to appear with him at town-hall meetings, a venue in which their man can use the kind of ease and charm he was been displaying for years on the Daily Show in interviews with Jon Stewart. But even if Obama accepts, that won't, to use a hallowed Republican phrase, be a cakewalk either.

Half a century ago, when presidents started appearing on TV, Dwight Eisenhower's campaign hired the movie actor-director Robert Montgomery to coach the former General into acting like good old friendly relaxed Ike. It worked.

Since then, Washington has been overrun by media trainers to teach politicians how to maintain eye contact, use the right gestures and fake looking natural. The McCain people could use a platoon of them.

A Brief History of Presidential Snitches

Scott McClellan has stirred a hornet's nest, not only among former Bush colleagues but journalists and political observers as well.

"Turncoat Time" is the head for Washington Post media critic's roundup of reactions including his own:

"Now he tells us? McClellan had deep qualms about Bush using propaganda to sell the Iraq war, about being misled on Valerie Plame, about the president being in denial on Hurricane Katrina, and he utters not a peep of public protest until he's ready to sell his book?...

"What's fascinating is that the conservative commentators who always sided with McClellan against the media mob are now denouncing him as a second-rate Benedict Arnold, while the liberal pundits who always ridiculed McClellan are hailing his belated truth-telling (while still ripping him as a sellout)."

Not fascinating, just predictable, but how much do we have a right to know about the inner workings of a White House and, perhaps more important, when?

In 1962, when Ike's former speech writer Emmet Hughes wrote a tell-all book about his Eisenhower days, John F. Kennedy was appalled.

According to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy thought Hughes "had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private conversations against them" and told his White House staff, "I hope no one around here is writing that kind of book."

Sorensen didn't and was scolded by some reviewers for his reticence, but others did and made headlines. This month, almost 50 years later, in a 556-page memoir, Sorensen still isn't dishing any dirt.

No Scott McClellan, he. But Kennedy's counselor was not working for a president who consistently lied in public and took his country into an unnecessary war with those lies.

If he had been, as someone who knows Sorensen's character first-hand, I am sure he would have resigned and gone public with what he knew, as McClellan and so many others who knew more, like Colin Powell, did not.

Loyalty is a virtue in a public man, but the question McClellan raises is loyalty to whom--the occupant of the Oval Office or the people who put him there. If he had spoken out three years sooner, they might be putting up statues of Bush's former press secretary. As it is, he'll have only his reviews and royalties to warm him on the long winter nights ahead.

Obama's Binds

He wanted it to be New Politics vs. Old Politics but, as the states dwindle down to a precious few, Barack Obama is being tied in political knots by ancient divisions of race, culture and social class that are being exploited by the Clinton campaign, with some unexpected help from Obama's former spiritual adviser.

You can dress up the differences, as David Brooks does, in new demographic garb, as the educated/less-educated divide, but that only puts a new gloss on the resentment and mistrust that have always fueled have-not hatred of those perceived to be privileged.

Half a century ago, the war hero known as Ike twice defeated the "egghead" Adlai Stevenson, so called because he spoke in coherent sentences. JFK barely beat Nixon, who was born wearing a jacket and tie, but LBJ's disastrous Vietnam war gave the Uriah Heep of presidents new life to act humble and "Bring Us Together" against the voluble Hubert Humphrey and then the cerebral George McGovern.

Ronald Reagan made an art form out of folksy to wipe out Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and, with an intermission for Bill Clinton's down-home act, we got the man you would like to have a beer with, George Bush, over the wonkish Al Gore and the stiff John Kerry.

So Barrack Obama's dilemma is nothing new in American politics, except for the piquant touch of a self-made man of mixed race being eliticized by a former First Lady and an Admiral's son with a very rich wife.

"You can't beat brains," JFK liked to say, but to get to the White House, you are well-advised to hide them. If he can survive his current ordeal of being bitten by demographic ducks, Obama would bring something to the presidency that hasn't been seen much lately.

After Bush, do we really want another jerk running the country?

An Eisenhower Endorsement and a Memory

Barack Obama's Kennedy coup is followed today by an endorsement from an Eisenhower, a lifelong Republican who believes the Illinois Senator "can encourage ordinary Americans to stand straight again...salve our national wounds and...assure the world and Americans that this great nation's impulses are still free, open, fair and broad-minded."

Barbara Eisenhower likens Obama to her grandfather who was elected with "the indispensable help of a 'Democrats for Eisenhower' movement. These crossover voters were attracted by his pledge to bring change to Washington and by the prospect that he would unify the nation."

Her decision recalls a night in 1964 when Ike was wrestling with his conscience about an endorsement that might have changed the Republican Party and American history.

Sitting on his darkened porch in Gettysburg with half a dozen visiting editors, Eisenhower talked about a barrage of advice from friends to save his party from nominating Barry Goldwater by a backing a liberal Republican, Gov. William Scranton.

Clearly opposed to Goldwater's brand of conservatism, the former President spoke bitterly about the Arizona Senator but could not bring himself to go public with his concerns and back Scranton.

Barbara Eisenhower's younger sister, Mary Jean, then eight, was sitting in a corner, wide-eyed, taking it all in. Now, her generation of Eisenhowers is having its say.

In her Washington Post OpEd, Barbara Eisenhower quotes from Ike's farewell address: "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

She might have added something else he said then: "People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

Fred Thompson's Name Value

Political name recognition has gone Nutsy Fagin. This weekend the Washington Post has a disquisition on the power of the name “Fred.”

Anticipating the entry of Thompson into the Presidential race, an onomastician (scholar of the linguistics of names) tells us "The name Fred is basic and homey. It should give people a reassuring image."

Thompson augurs well, too, “a name with natural trochaic rhythm, which replicates a heartbeat and thus starts building appeal in the womb."

In 2004, we learn, there was a book titled "The Fred Factor" to extol the pleasures of hard work, and more promising still, further research reveals that “Fred” is derived from the German, meaning “Peace Ruler.”

In an earlier day, the candidate-to-be would have had to present his full appellation, Frederick Dalton Thompson. But Harry Truman started it all going downhill. Before him, Presidents had stately, sonorous names--Franklin, Herbert, Grover, Woodrow--but Truman was a not a Henry turned folksy, Harry was on his birth certificate.

After that, Dwight David Eisenhower was shortened to “Ike” by headline writers and the floodgates were open to Jimmy and Bill. Now every Tom, Dick or Harry can run for President, although two recent Georges have stemmed the tide temporarily.

Fred should do well against Hillary, which sounds like the name of the victim in an Agatha Christie mystery, but his chances against Barack, which means “blessed,” are etymologically uncertain.