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Ryan Liza: “The Biden campaign has been studying the ’18 midterms. No, not the ones two years ago when Democrats took over the House by aggressively recruiting moderates and sweeping swing districts across the country, a precursor to Biden’s own centrist strategy in the Democratic presidential primaries this year.”
“They’ve been studying the midterms of 1918, the year of the Spanish flu pandemic when large gatherings were banned in many places and candidates were forced to invent new ways to communicate with voters and run their campaigns. Turnout plummeted that year to 40%, from 50% in the 1914 midterms.”
Jon Meacham: “It will be tempting for leaders in those states and others to postpone their primaries. Instead, in this hour of crisis, state officials — understandably scrambling to secure their people — should do all they can to hold their elections as soon as possible. The legitimacy of the eventual Democratic nominee could depend on it.”
“History is on the side of proceeding in times of uncertainty. There’s something in the American character that has long insisted on pressing ahead with democracy’s fundamental task: the casting of ballots and the choosing of leaders. In addition to the Lincoln example, historians know that James Madison was re-elected amid the War of 1812; the midterm elections of 1814 took place not long after the British had invaded Washington; the 1918 balloting occurred despite the ravages of the Spanish flu; 1932 went forward in the face of the Great Depression; and Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected in 1944, during World War II. Even 9/11 delayed the New York City mayoral election only by a matter of weeks.”
Garrett Graff: “The worry and unease about COVID-19 feels so inescapable that Americans can easily miss the sheer beauty of what is unfolding across the country right now. Yes, we are approaching errands that were routine just a week ago—to the hardware store or the grocery store—with the same wariness that we might bring to an Arctic exploration. Yet if we take a step back from the panic-buying of toilet paper, the response to COVID-19 should stand as one of the most beautiful moments in our country’s long history—a moment of shared, galvanizing national spirit that has existed in perhaps only in a handful of epochal years before, like 1776, 1861, 1933, and 1941, and, in modern times, after 9/11.”
“We are witnessing people everywhere, acting mostly independently but all together, shutting our country down—a move that ensures millions will face a massive, incalculable economic hit—to give the weakest among us a better chance against the novel coronavirus. We are each sacrificing our daily routines—our gyms and coffee shops and offices—to keep health-care professionals from becoming overwhelmed.”
New York Times: “Crises are moments when presidents can rise above prior troubles or sink deeper into them, as Mr. Bush discovered. A onetime political colossus with a 90 percent approval rating built on his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Bush’s presidency was marred by Katrina, which became a modern metaphor for a mishandled crisis.”
“Whether Mr. Trump’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak becomes remembered the same way or not, it is too early to say, and they are very different challenges. But the history of presidents grappling with crises is replete with lessons that sometimes go unlearned and examples that go unheeded.”
Rudy Giuliani secretly asked then-New York Gov. George Pataki to cancel New York City’s 2001 mayoral election so he could remain in office following the Sept. 11 terror attack, the New York Post reports.
The bombshell revelation is contained in Pataki’s upcoming memoir of 9/11, Beyond the Great Divide: How A Nation Became A Neighborhood.
“I don’t see a whole lot of 2016 in this election. I see a whole lot of 1972.”
— Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), quoted by the Charleston Post & Courier, comparing Bernie Sanders to George McGovern.
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Just Security: “What will the future think of President Trump and two historic votes senators must take on his impeachment? The obituaries of the Republicans who voted in favor and against the articles of impeachment for President Richard Nixon could provide some insight. How these GOP members of Congress voted in 1974 featured prominently in all of their obituaries.”
As the question period begins in President Trump’s impeachment trial later today, the New York Times has an interesting look back at how President Clinton’s legal team communicated with Senate Democrats during that trial 21 years ago.
“During the question-and-answer period of the trial, for instance, the White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff worked out a secret signal with Mr. Daschle’s Democratic staff whenever he needed an opportunity to speak.”
“When Mr. Ruff laid his pen down on the table in front of him, the Democratic staff members submitted an open-ended question on a notecard for Chief Justice Rehnquist to read asking if the White House legal team wanted to respond to anything the House managers had said. Even Mr. Ruff’s fellow White House lawyers did not know what the secret signal was.”
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Jeff Greenfield: “What happens when a party nominates a candidate who triumphs because of familiarity, or because ‘it’s her turn,’ or because he’s steadily ascended the party ranks despite no defining passion or cause? The track record of these “default” nominees, at least in modern political history, is bleak.”
“Hillary Clinton is the latest and, for the Democrats, still most painful example. The combination of her experience, her family ties and the sense that (in the words of a proposed campaign slogan) it was ‘her turn’ drove every potentially serious rival out of the 2016 race. Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong primary challenge was a foreshadowing of her vulnerabilities, even if the signal was mostly dismissed until about 9 p.m. on election night in November.”
“Four years before Hillary Clinton was defeated, the Republicans trotted out the reliable, central-casting Mitt Romney to lose to President Barack Obama, a campaign that seemed to rhyme with the time the Dems unenthusiastically fell in line for John Kerry against President George W. Bush in 2004. Keep going back, and you see candidates like these over and over, marching under flags of pale pastel, all going down to defeat in November: Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey and even Richard Nixon, in his first run, in 1960.”
Ron Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Reagan, told the Daily Beast that his father would have been “embarrassed and ashamed” of the current Republican president.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN its impossible to compare President Trump to past holders of the office.
Said Brinkley: “We always are trying to compare presidents to each other, but we haven’t had an outlaw president before, and that’s what you have with Donald Trump.”
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This looks interesting: Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep.
NPR has an interview with the author.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.