First Read: “But as universally praised and beloved as Mandela is now, anyone who was politically aware in the 1980s or 1990s knows that always wasn’t the case. After all, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan vetoed legislation — which Congress overrode — punishing South Africa for its racial apartheid. A lot of it had to do with Cold War mentality at the time; some viewed Mandela as on the wrong side of that fight. But it’s all a reminder how the passage of time and history can transform a one-time controversial figure into a political saint, and vice-versa. But it’s also a lesson that sometimes a policy of the moment will end up being embarrassing; politicians today ought to think about what a policy decision in the moment will look like a generation later.”
How Clinton Won New York
Steve Kornacki has a fascinating look back at the 1992 Democratic presidential primary in New York, which was a dramatic and chaotic do-or-die test for Bill Clinton after he lost the Connecticut primary unexpectedly to Jerry Brown.
“When the Connecticut result came in, the basic nature of the Democratic
race changed on the spot, transforming the next major contest on the
calendar into a make-or-break test for Bill Clinton. If he could win it,
his inevitability would be restored. But lose again, to Jerry Brown,
and all hell would break loose.”
“And here was the worst part for Clinton. Of all the venues for that that next major test, that do-or-die battle, it would be playing out in a state where they practiced a notoriously cutthroat brand of politics; a state where his southern accent marked him as a suspicious outsider, a used car salesman; where the media delighted in chewing up supposed front-runners; where an unusually powerful tabloid press would giddily plaster his personal baggage on its covers; where one major liberal columnist was already calling him “Slick Willie” while another simply branded him “a fraud”; where one of the biggest-name Democratic politicians was openly arguing that his “character problems” made him “unacceptable to the vast majority of Democrats”; a state whose Democratic governor had nearly launched a presidential campaign of his own, and who was now being touted as the white knight who could rescue the party if Clinton stumbled just once more – a governor, by the way, whom Clinton had personally insulted in secretly recorded conversations that had come to light months earlier.”
’12 Years a Slave’ and the Obama Era
Jonathan Chait: “This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.”
A Living History of the JFK Assassination
Just released for the iPhone: The Day That Launched The Kennedy Half Century.
It’s a companion app for Larry Sabato’s The Kennedy Half Century.
Majority Think Oswald Did Not Act Alone
As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches, a new Gallup poll finds that 61% of Americans still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved.
The Monkey Cage: “Why are Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories so popular? The distinguishing feature of a successful conspiracy theory is power, and the Kennedy assassination has that in spades. The victim was an American president and the potential villains include actors of immense reach and influence.”
The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination
Out next week: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon.
Former Speaker Foley Dies
Former Speaker Thomas Foley (D-WA), who spent
30 years in Congress as a kingpin on agriculture, ultimately leading the
chamber as the ‘Speaker from Spokane,’ has died, Roll Call reports.
He was 84.
Kennedy’s Best Moments
This is kind of amazing: JFK 50 Year Commemorative Collection.
The most important moments of Kennedy’s 1,000 days as president as compiled by the National Archives.
4 Lessons from Extinct Political Parties
The Week warns: “Not every political party lasts forever.”
The U.S. Has Defaulted Twice Before
Associated Press: “Once, the young nation had a dramatic excuse: The Treasury was empty, the White House and Capitol were charred ruins, even the troops fighting the War of 1812 weren’t getting paid.”
“A second time, in 1979, was a back-office glitch that ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Treasury Department blamed it on a crush of paperwork partly caused by lawmakers who — this will sound familiar — bickered too long before raising the nation’s debt limit.”
“These lapses, little noted outside financial circles in their day, are nearly forgotten now.”
Atwater on the Southern Strategy
The Nation has dug up the 1981 audio of the late Lee Atwater explaining how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves.
Said Atwater: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'”
Ditka Regrets Not Running Against Obama
Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka told the Dickinson Press that he regrets not running against Barack Obama to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Said Ditka: “Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Not that I would have won, but I probably would have and he wouldn’t be in the White House.”
10 Years After the Recall
The Los Angeles Times looks back at the recall election 10 years ago that swept California Gov. Gray Davis (D) from office.
“A decade on, the effects are still being felt, albeit subtly, and not the way proponents imagined, or the way actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the chief beneficiary, so grandly promised.”
“Fundamental changes in the way California elects its leaders — a top-two primary system aimed at pushing candidates to the ideological center and an impartial redrawing of the state’s political boundaries — will almost certainly change how Sacramento operates for years to come. Neither would likely have passed without Schwarzenegger sitting in the governor’s office.”
How Surges of Migration Transformed American Politics
In the mail: Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics by Michael Barone.
U.S. Narrowly Escaped Nuclear Blast in 1961
A newly-published book reports that a U.S. hydrogen bomb “nearly detonated on the nation’s east coast, with a single switch averting a blast which would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that flattened Hiroshima,” the AP reports.
The Guardian published the recently-declassified document which details the information.
Talking with Deep Throat
Bob Woodward’s notes of his discussions with “Deep Throat” during the Watergate crisis are now posted online.
Wilson
Out this week: Wilson by A. Scott Berg.
“One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson–the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President.”
David Frost is Dead
The longtime broadcaster David Frost, who won fame for his interview with the former President Richard M. Nixon, has died at age 74, the New York Times reports.
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