Palin Seeks FDR’s Endorsement
Palin Seeks FDR’s Endorsement
Harvey J. Kaye: Palin Seeks FDR’s Endorsement
Sarah Palin is running for President of the United States. In her new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, she essentially declares her candidacy–not so much by what she says as by what she does not say. Even as she champions the Tea Party movement and professes her belief in God, the free market, and a conservative rendition of American exceptionalism, and even as she seeks to reignite the culture wars and portrays liberals and progressives as un-American, or at least as different than most every other American, she does not attack FDR.
In fact, taking a leaf from Ronald Reagan?s 1980 political playbook, Palin rhetorically enlists Roosevelt to her cause. Not the Roosevelt of the New Deal–the Roosevelt who refashioned American democratic government and empowered working people to more effectively address the crisis of the Great Depression and pursue programs of recovery, reconstruction, and reform. Instead, she evokes Roosevelt the war president: not the Roosevelt who enunciated the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, but the Roosevelt who led the nation in a D-Day prayer on June 6, 1944.
Palin is smart. She is smart enough to know that Americans not only continue to revere FDR?s memory and value his legacy, but rank him alongside Washington and Lincoln as one of our three greatest presidents and, clearly, the greatest president of the twentieth century. Moreover, Palin is smart enough to recognize–as her hero Ronald Reagan did–that while you can win followers, garner high ratings on the radio, and win elections in states like South Carolina, you cannot win the presidency by attacking one of America?s ?greats.? You especially can?t attack the guy who enacted Social Security and led the nation against European fascism and Japanese imperialism. And she is also smart enough to have secured a ghostwriter who can find words from that very president, along with the words of other progressive Americans, which she not only can embrace without losing her right-wing reputation, but can also use to exasperate her antagonists.
Notably, she harnesses not only the Founders, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Right?s own presidential favorites Calvin Coolidge (yes, Calvin Coolidge) and Ronald Reagan, but also American radicals and liberals such as Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She makes silly historical mistakes along the way (John Adams was attending the Second Continental Congress, not the Constitutional Convention, when Abigail told him to ?Remember the ladies?). Even more critically, she rips these figures and their words out of history and makes them nearly unrecognizable as the progressives they were. As journalist Michelle Goldberg has noted, Palin tries to turn Cady Stanton, the feminist freethinker who published The Woman?s Bible, into a God-fearing Christian conservative. Similarly, Palin utterly ignores King?s commitment to economic and social justice and the labor movement. I could go on.
Of course, all of that is to be expected. How else can you reach beyond your base and appeal to people who would otherwise dismiss you as a candidate? Reagan succeeded in creating ?Reagan Democrats? and beating Carter in 1980. Palin no doubt hopes to cultivate ?Palin Democrats? and defeat Obama in 2012. Don?t scoff. Given Obama and the Democrats? sorry political performance thus far, anything is possible.
But what gives it all away, what makes it abundantly clear that Sarah is running, is that as much as she celebrates the Tenth Amendment and rants and raves against “big government,” she avoids attacking FDR and the New Deal directly. This is all the rage on the Right, as we can see in the recent tomes by blathering-head Glenn Beck, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, and Texas governor Rick Perry. But of course, Beck, DeMint, and Perry are not running for president (at least, I don?t think so). Palin, however, is. And thus, instead of taking on Roosevelt and the New Deal, she goes after Obama and the Democrats? Healthcare Reform Act, the bailout of the banks, and the $800 billion stimulus package–as well as, amazingly enough, the establishment of the Federal Income Tax–as examples of Washington?s unceasing ?power grabs.?
Don?t get me wrong. Palin may not go after FDR, but she?d be happy to forget him and have the rest of us forget him too. As she writes: ?We can and should celebrate the giants of America–the Washingtons, the Lincolns, and the Reagans.? (Give me a break!) And yet Palin knows she cannot erase Roosevelt from our memory that easily. So she uses what she can of his memory to help her restore God and religion to the public square against the ambitions of the ?secular left? to drive them completely out.
Defending George W. Bush?s ?unapologetic evocation of his faith?–for which, she notes, he was ?attacked as a ?theocrat? or a ?Christian fascist??–she recalls how Roosevelt, ?a Democratic president,? also publicly expressed his faith ?in a time of need.? Palin writes:
On the evening of June 6, 1944, as Allied troops battled and died on the beaches of France following the Normandy invasion, FDR led the nation in prayer. And it wasn?t just a speech with a casual reference to the Almighty. It was a full-throated, on-your-knees prayer to a national radio audience estimated at one hundred million, making it, according to some, the largest single mass prayer of all time.
And she then quotes the prayer in its entirety.
Sarah Palin is definitely running for President of the United States.
What would FDR say and do about that? If Sarah is right about his religiosity, he might have said, ?God help us.? But we know he?d do more than that. And we need to do more than that as well.
An earlier version of this post appeared at New Deal 2.0, a project of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
