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Los Angeles Times
05-08-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Kamala Harris won't cure what ails the Democratic Party
William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term. Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.) Everyone else since Harrison's era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don't like losers. These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House. But history isn't what she should worry about. It's the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. It's net favorability ( 30 points) is nearly triple the GOP's (11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump's unpopularity with Democrats should be having the opposite effect, 63% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the party. Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party — both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he's in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, 'Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.' It's not all Harris' fault. Indeed, the lion's share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again. Harris' dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn't monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren't fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is visceral desire to win. That's awkward for a politician best known for losing. Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew. Of course, most Democrats don't see her race and gender as a problem, and in the abstract they shouldn't. Indeed, every VP pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition. So Harris' problem isn't her race or sex; it's her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn't lose because of low Democratic turnout, she lost because she's uncompelling to a changing electorate. Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. With the exception of reproductive rights, her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups, at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Biden's insistence she not distance herself from him. Such clubby deference to the establishment combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies — learned from years of San Francisco and California politics — makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert's 'The Late Show' for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network's decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrow-casts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate. 'I don't want to go back into the system. I think it's broken,' Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the 'naïve' and 'feckless' lack of 'leadership' and the 'capitulation' of those who 'consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.' That's all catnip to Colbert's ideologically committed audience. But that's not the audience Democrats need to win. And that's why, if Democrats nominate her again, she'll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won't be 'Who was the 48th president of the United States?' @JonahDispatch
Daily Maverick
28-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Elon Musk's third party – pie in the sky, or does it have a real chance of success?
Once and future political kingmaker Elon Musk is dreaming of starting a third political party to seize the high ground from both Democrats and Republicans. Could he do it, and have there been historical examples of successful third parties in American politics? When Elon Musk and Donald Trump angrily – or was it petulantly – ended their unique political marriage, utilising Trump's rhetoric and Musk's money, Musk soon enough began talking about creating a new third party to challenge the Democratic-Republican parties' seeming lock on American politics. A big chunk of that talk revolved around the ostensible overlapping similarities of the Republicrats/Demopublicans in their basic ideas in contesting elections, with the argument that nothing really changes, no matter who wins. Instead, the national debt continues to grow, the federal deficit continues to balloon, and, courtesy of the country's actual politics in the congressional-presidential partnership, it is all just about taxing, spending and borrowing. The usual understanding of American political parties and the country's political architecture is that the system basically precludes the rise and success of third-party challenges to that duopoly. But that is not entirely true in the historical record, and thus what it might mean for the future of Musk's presumed intentions. From the beginning of the republic, it is important to realise that political parties were not even mentioned in the American Constitution or any early legislation. Washington's warning The nation's first president, George Washington, in his last major public utterance, his 'Farewell Address', had warned the country that political factions would seek to obstruct the execution of the laws created by the government or even to prevent the branches of government from exercising the powers provided to them by the Constitution. Washington had further warned that factions might claim to be trying to answer popular demands for solving pressing problems, but their real intentions would be to take the power from the people and place it in the hands of unjust men. Some of that warning still rings true. In fact, by the time Washington had offered such advice, the nation's political leadership was already splitting into two parties – the Federalists under John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who urged a stronger national government and infrastructure development, versus the Democratic-Republicans under Thomas Jefferson, who favoured a weaker national government. Over time, the Federalists withered away due to their opposition to what the Americans called the War of 1812. They were eventually replaced by the Whig Party, which advocated strongly for national improvements such as railroads, harbours and canals, as well as the expansion of the nation to the west, at least in part to elide around the question of the expansion or preservation of the institution of legal slavery. On the increasingly vexed issue of slavery – including its abolition, expansion, or the prevention of expansion into new territories – the Whigs remained largely silent even as slavery was becoming a key political division of the nation. By 1856, however, the tangled issue of slavery had given rise to entirely new political movements, first the Free Soil Party and then the Republicans. Four years later, in what remained the country's most successful third-party effort, the Republicans successfully ran candidates for congressional seats as well as their presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, winning in a four-way race. In the northern half of the nation, Lincoln trounced a divided Democratic Party, winning sufficient electoral votes to gain a majority of the national electoral vote total. In the South, the other half of the Democratic Party faced the last gasp of the Whigs, now renamed the Constitutional Union Party, winning most of the electoral votes at stake there. The geographical split became the harbinger of the Civil War that began shortly after the election. The Constitutional Union Party disappeared entirely – as it had attempted to push slavery off the national discussion agenda, something impossible given the tenor of the time. Thus, the outcome of the 1860 election points to a key question confronted by every potential third (or fourth) party challenge. Winning popular votes does not easily translate into electoral college success sufficient to win a state's electoral votes – unless one wins a plurality of the popular vote, state by state. As a result, winning even 20% of an election's popular vote total can still translate into zero electoral votes – and it is the electoral votes that determine an electoral outcome. In a phrase, the presidential electoral system is a kind of indirect election as opposed to simply winning x number of votes. Many countries have proportional electoral systems for their parliamentary governments and thus prime ministerships. Such systems do not discourage the formation of third, fourth, fifth or even more separate parties – if they win sufficient parliamentary seats, the respective parties negotiate to form governing coalitions. By contrast, the two long-time dominant American parties, in the absence of any overwhelming national question that threatens to destroy the nation, such as slavery's continuation or expansion, build their respective electoral coalitions within the organisational confines of those two parties. They negotiate compromises among factions within the party and potential supporters and often incorporate ideas, proposals and visions from beyond the party to gain sufficient support to win at the polls. Perhaps the best example of this was the Democratic Party's victory under Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Under his leadership, the party enthusiastically embraced ideas for social security measures, broader rights for union recognition, emergency employment relief and other social welfare messages previously proposed by various proponents of what were often called socialist ideas. Those proposals, made amid the Great Depression, helped Democrats gain a massive victory over the hapless incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover. More recently, the Republicans have absorbed a whole range of marginal, conspiratorial views and attitudes from fringe groups and made them central to their party's ideology in the hands and language of the current president, Donald Trump. Musk's third party Looking ahead, what about Elon Musk's promise, or threat, to sponsor and underwrite a new third party? Beyond the origins of the Republican Party, numerous other third-party efforts have taken place – usually in response to the sense that the feelings and concerns of whole classes of potential voters are being ignored and have not – or cannot – be incorporated into either of the two major parties' offerings. Theodore Roosevelt's 'Bull Moose' Party in the 1912 election was a kind of anomaly based on the idea that the actual Republican nominee and incumbent president, William Howard Taft, had backslid from his mentor and former president, Theodore Roosevelt's progressive policies. Roosevelt actually gained more popular votes than the party's formal candidate, thus splitting the Republican vote and giving Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson the win. Other significant third-party candidates – Henry Wallace, Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968 and 1972, John Anderson in 1980, various Libertarian Party candidates over the years, Dr Jill Stein in multiple elections, and Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 – were actually on the ballots of multiple states. Save for the experiences of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, while these candidates received significant popular vote totals (and sometimes made the difference in who the ultimate winner would be as was the case with Jill Stein in 2000), they failed to gain a plurality of the votes in any state, thus failing to gain electoral votes in their respective presidential elections. Thurmond and George Wallace's candidacies represented racial segregation protest votes over increasing racial integration under federal laws and thereby gained some electoral vote success in the South. Henry Wallace's run was largely in protest over the increasing drift towards a cold war with the Soviet Union. Anderson, Stein, and Perot, in different ways, argued that the existing parties failed to address the need for new political approaches beyond a nearly moribund status quo. For Perot in particular, concern over tax policies and the national debt/government deficit were key to his agenda. However, none of the latter three – plus the various Libertarian Party candidates – ever achieved actual electoral vote success. The challenge This goes to the heart of Elon Musk's task and challenge. To create a new national political party, elections in America remain the responsibility of the several states, not the federal government. That means the creators of a new national party must do so across the landscape of many states – and each state's rules and regulations are different. To create a party as a functioning organisation is one thing, but getting that party on the ballot across the nation is very different. Each state will require thousands of signatures on petitions by registered voters in their state, as well as addressing other legal requirements. Additionally, an actual political party organisation will need to conform to the financial registration and reporting requirements of the Federal Elections Commission concerning recording campaign contributions and expenses, once they set up fundraising mechanisms. None of this is simple, all of it is time-consuming, and most of it is expensive in terms of legal work. Of course, if you are Elon Musk and you are serious about doing this, money isn't all that much of an obstacle. Much more important will be answering the fundamental question of why such a party is desirable or necessary. What are its goals and objectives on the big questions (whatever they are), and how does it propose to address them? And perhaps most important of all, who will put their hand up as a candidate? Where will a serious candidate or candidates come from, and what kind of relevant experience will they bring to the challenge? How will they be picked? What kind of convention or nominating process is contemplated? One further thing to consider is that there are, in fact, many political parties in the US, perhaps two dozen or more, but mostly active at individual state or local election levels, where the mechanics of managing the creation of a party are less daunting. The Libertarian and Green Parties both already have national presences, and in recent elections, they have fought to be listed on the ballots of every state. One conceivable approach would be for Elon Musk to simply take over one or the other of those minor parties and thus sidestep the registration and organisation of an entirely new party. However, it is hard to imagine how his ideas would easily comport with either of those two minor parties. Yet another alternative conceivably might be for Musk to finance an aggressive operation to gain control of the Republican Party machinery, even though that would run into a buzzsaw of opposition from party regulars, the Maga crowd and current office holders under the Republican banner. But with enough money, he probably could overcome the institutional hurdles of launching a new party. However, the basic questions of what it would stand for, who would be its leader or leaders, and how voters could find such an alternative attractive remain almost entirely unanswerable at this moment. Election 2028, sans Trump However, there is the fact that the 2028 general election will be the first in 12 years without Donald Trump as a candidate. At least for now, the challengers' race among Republicans for that nomination is only beginning to form, and the nature of their respective key ideas remains a mystery. The one great third-party success was back in 1860. That is a long time ago and came before almost all the contemporary rules, regulations, technology, and campaign management techniques had come into existence. We are left with the conclusion that Musk's threat to bankroll a new party is really an effort to do battle with his one-time friend and political partner. There is one further factor to consider. Rather than aiming initially for a presidential race, Musk and his coterie may be planning to pursue efforts to elect independent candidates in congressional races across the country. The hurdles to such candidacies would be lower, the races could be selected based on popular dissatisfaction with incumbent Republicans aiming for reelection, or where no incumbent will be running due to a retirement, illness or death. There are, of course, current senators who are technically independents – Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. Both of those caucus with the Democrats, but have successfully run as independents in their respective races. Further in the past, other senators and congressmen who were independents or even members of the Socialist Party successfully won their elections. Some of that history may give Elon Musk's team hope for a viable third party, even if it is one that can't gain the White House. Perhaps it can, at first, gain a toehold in Congress, or in state legislatures. But all of that presupposes Musk's attention will stay intently engaged on such political dreams, rather than colonising Mars or reviving the Tesla brand. DM
Boston Globe
31-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 1840s president, dies at 96
Mr. Tyler suffered a series of small strokes starting in 2012 and was later diagnosed with dementia. In recent years, his son William Bouknight Tyler oversaw the James River plantation that had been his family's ancestral home. Mr. Tyler, a retired businessman, and his older brother, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who died at age 95 in 2020, were sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. (1853-1935), a longtime president of the College of William & Mary. Their grandfather was the U.S. president who pushed for the annexation of Texas as American expansion moved west, but he is perhaps best known for the Whig Party's memorable 1840 presidential campaign slogan, 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a remarkable instance of successive longevities and late-in-life paternities, the Tyler family produced a genealogical marvel, if not a singularity: three generations that spanned nearly the entire history of the American experience. Advertisement Successive longevities over centuries are not uncommon, although they are not easily documented in ordinary families. But that was hardly the case with the former president and his academically distinguished son. And in 2012, when the website Mental Floss reported that two grandsons of President Tyler were still alive, the news -- 'an amazing, seemingly impossible piece of American trivia,' as New York magazine put it -- went viral. Advertisement Yahoo, The Huffington Post, Fox News and Politico all rushed to publish articles. There were interviews with the grandsons, who told of other famous ancestors, including a great-grandfather, John Tyler Sr., born in 1747, who was a roommate of Thomas Jefferson at William & Mary, served in the Continental Army, became governor of Virginia and had eight children, including the future president. 'I heard too much about presidents growing up,' Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. told the Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 2013. He recalled family anecdotes about Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, the American Revolution, the Civil War and, especially, President John Tyler, his grandfather. Born in 1790, less than a year after Washington's first inauguration, John Tyler became the governor of Virginia, a United States representative and a senator. In the election of 1840, the Whig Party chose William Henry Harrison, a former governor of the Indiana Territory and senator from Ohio, as its presidential candidate, and John Tyler as his vice-presidential running mate. Historians say John Tyler, a lifelong slave owner and advocate of states' rights, was selected to balance the ticket and attract Southerners who feared Harrison might harbor abolitionist leanings. Harrison, known as Old Tippecanoe, had led American forces that defeated Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana in 1811. The Whigs attacked Martin Van Buren, the Democratic incumbent, with a bandwagon campaign featuring the 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' slogan. Harrison and John Tyler won handily and were sworn in on March 4, 1841. But Harrison died of pneumonia after only a month in office. John Tyler, the first vice president to succeed a dead president, quickly took the oath of office, moved into the White House and assumed the full powers of the presidency. Advertisement His claim to the presidency was disputed by many in Congress and never accepted by some, who referred to him as 'His Accidency.' But his forceful grasp of the office set a precedent and served as a model for successions until the issue was clarified by the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967. John Tyler, who regarded much of the Whig platform as unconstitutional, vetoed legislation and bypassed Whig leaders, who expelled him from the party and tried, unsuccessfully, to impeach him. Most of his Cabinet resigned. His most notable achievement was his advocacy for the annexation of Texas, which became the nation's 28th state in 1845. Robert Seager II, in a 1963 biography, 'And Tyler Too,' called John Tyler 'one of America's most obscure chief executives,' adding, 'His countrymen generally remember him, if they have heard of him at all, as the rhyming end of a catchy campaign slogan.' After leaving the presidency, John Tyler retired to his Virginia plantation and withdrew from politics. When the Civil War began in 1861, he sided with the Confederacy and was elected to the Confederate legislature, but he died in 1862, at age 71, before taking office. He fathered 15 children, the most of any American president, with two wives: Letitia Christian, who died in 1842, and Julia Gardiner, a 24-year-old debutante who married him in 1844, when he was 54. The 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who lived to 81, served as president of William & Mary, the nation's second oldest college (chartered in 1693), from 1888 to 1919. He had three children with his first wife, Anne Baker (Tucker) Tyler, who died in 1921. In 1923, he married Sue Ruffin, and they had three more children: Lyon Gardiner Jr., Harrison Ruffin and Henry, who died in infancy. Advertisement Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born in Virginia on Nov. 9, 1928, earned a degree in chemistry at William & Mary in 1949 and a chemical engineering degree at Virginia Tech in 1951. In 1968, he was a founder of ChemTreat, an industrial water treatment business. He retired in 2000. Mr. Tyler married Frances Payne Bouknight in 1957; she died in 2019. In addition to their son William, he is survived by their daughter, Julia Gardiner Tyler Samaniego; another son, Harrison Ruffin Tyler Jr.; and eight grandchildren. Mr. Tyler and his wife helped to restore his ancestral home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, a 1,600-acre National Historic Landmark on the James River in Charles City County, Virginia, and lived there for many years. The plantation was built around 1730 and bought by the family in 1842. In 2001, Mr. Tyler donated $5 million and 22,000 books to the College of William & Mary history department, which was renamed in his honor in 2021. In 2012, he told New York magazine that he was not much interested in modern politics. 'Oh, my family's conservative,' he said. 'I served as the chairman of the Republican Party here, but I'm sorry, I've sort of lost interest. They're killing each other, on both sides. The campaigns are just horrible. It has nothing to do with what we really need.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
On This Day, March 20: Sarin attack on Tokyo subway kills 14
March 20 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. In 1854, in what is considered the founding meeting of the Republican Party, former members of the Whig Party met in Ripon, Wis., to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. In 1963, a volcano on the East Indies island of Bali began erupting. The death toll exceeded 1,500. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Alabama National Guard to provide security at a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery the next day. Earlier marches turned violent and deadly, but the third march was considered more of a success both in terms of safety and in spreading the message of the right to vote for black Americans. In 1976, San Francisco newspaper heiress and kidnapping victim Patty Hearst was convicted of bank robbery. Hearst served 22 months in prison and eventually was granted a full pardon. In 1987, the U.S. government approved the sale of AZT, a treatment, but not a cure, for AIDS. In 1995, 12 people were killed, and more than 5,000 made ill in a nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. A 13th victim died a day later and a 14th in 2008. The perpetrators, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, were executed in 2018. In 1996, the world learned of "mad cow" disease from a British government report questioning the safety of beef in Britain. In 1997, the Liggett Group, fifth-largest U.S. tobacco company, agreed to admit that smoking was addictive and caused health problems and that the tobacco industry had sought for years to sell its products to children as young as 14. In 2001, five days after explosions destroyed one of its support beams and killed 11 people, the largest oil rig in the world collapsed and sank off the coast of Brazil. In 2003, U.S.-led coalition forces begin military operations in Iraq. The Iraq War officially ended In 2004, after narrowly escaping assassination the day before, Chen Shui-bian was re-elected president of Taiwan with about 50 percent of the vote. In 2007, former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was hanged in Baghdad for his part in the 1982 deaths of 148 Shiites. In 2010, the first eruption of a volcano in southern Iceland since the 1820s forced the evacuation of 450 people, but there were no reports of injuries or major property damage. In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928 after normalizing relations between the two countries. In 2019, the Walt Disney Co. officially completed its $71.3 billion purchase of a large chunk of 21st Century Fox. In 2024, the Biden administration released a finalized new Environmental Protection Agency rule regulating vehicles that leans heavily on significant increase in electric and hybrid vehicles on the market in eight years. Less than a year later, the Trump administration announced a rollback of dozens of EPA regulations, including those seeking to reduce vehicle emissions.
