Martin Meenagh blog

  Gary Hart was George McGovern’s campaign manager. A young Democrat in 1974, he ousted a serving Senator in Colorado, and embodied the new Democratic Party which had begun to emerge in the transparent, environmentally conscious technology- and policy-driven culture of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. He served on one of the most consequential committees in modern congressional history—the Church Committee—which investigated and contributed to the abortive reform of America’s Intelligence agencies. An ‘Atari Democrat’ who promoted the semiconductor industry, Hart merged new politics with a grasp of the primary process, and came very close to snatching the Democratic nomination from a former vice-president anointed by the party’s establishment. Hart was one of a number of Democrats elected in the wake of the oil price shocks and Watergate who formed a bridge to the neoliberal Democratic leadership Council without completely breaking with the past. Instead, politic...

  The passage of time often changes the apparent significance of events. This is because events are given meaning from the standpoint of observers, not all of whom share the same perspective. James Carter, for instance, has often attributed the enmity of Senator Edward Kennedy, which undermined his 1980 re-election bid, to Carter’s near forgotten failure to appoint Archibald Cox, a Watergate investigator, to a seat on a federal bench at Kennedy’s suggestion. Similarly, Michael Holt has made a persuasive case that decisions by Franklin Pierce on the construction of his cabinet led to the collapse of the national political parties and were a major secondary cause of the Civil War of 1861-65. The Watergate affair is an unusually rich example of this process. The twists and turns of a story which emerged from a burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate building in a presidential election year took place in a demented and polarised cultural and political atmo...

  President Woodrow Wilson famously went to bed on the night of the 1916 presidential vote believing that he had lost, as did the New York Times , which had declared the race for his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. The newspaper did this in part because, on early returns, Wilson had lost the entire North bar New Hampshire and Ohio. A (prematurely identified) tide was seen to be running against re-election. For two days, until Southern, Western, and Midwestern votes were declared, it still seemed likely that the next president would be Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate. State and local elections also suggested, as Thomas Knock has noted, that the Socialist vote was reasonably strong, which, given the reunification of the Republican party after the split between Roosevelt and Taft in 1912, suggested that Wilson could lose states such as California and North Dakota. It is in fact reasonably well established that Wilson was not suffering from an excess of false humilit...

  Harry Truman became president in unusual, but not unprecedented, circumstances. Truman succeeded upon the death of a popular president who had recently been re-elected, in the midst of a global war in which the United States was approaching victory. At a basic level, he did not undermine the legacy his predecessor had worked towards, as Andrew Johnson had done, and nor did he preside over a dangerous post-war economy recklessly, as Calvin Coolidge had. He did not fire or remove the cabinet and advisors assembled by his predecessor—as Tyler did—and, unlike Lyndon Johnson, he did not deceptively escalate a major Asian war. He also won re-election in his own right, unlike Presidents Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, and Arthur, who had risen from the vice-presidency to the presidency after presidential death. In this basic analysis, Truman was a somewhat successful president. Political historians and analysts may employ such a feral metric to assess Truman, but there are other outstandi...

    Nullification is the idea that a State government, within its own jurisdiction and in pursuit of its own sovereignty, can ‘nullify’ a federal law which the government of the State believes to be unconstitutional. Interposition is a related idea that the State can interpose itself between a bad federal law and a State citizen by declaring the law unconstitutional but not taking any further action other than the application of moral pressure to other states and federal bodies. Neither idea is viable as a legal recourse, and both have been rejected by the Supreme Court and the evidence of constitutional scholars at almost every point they have been mooted. They have persisted as ideas because of a series of attempts to employ them, many associated with racist and specious arguments wielded against native Americans and minorities, but also out of partisan fervour. The ideas emerged from the Quasi-War of 1798-1800 and the fears of the Democratic-Republican party in the 17...