The New Landonists

[lsanderson]

By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, February 5, 2009; Page

The leader of the Republican Party was fulminating against the Democratic president's programs. All that government spending, and yet, he said, "the nation has not made the durable progress, either in reform or recovery, that we had the right to expect." The problem was that the president didn't trust the market to right the economy: "The energies of the American economic system will remedy the ravages of depression," he argued.

And then there was that Republican radio ad featuring a couple wondering if they could afford to get married in a nation with so profligate a government. "All those debts!" said Mary. "Somebody is giving us a dirty deal," said John. The ad concluded with a somber narrator saying, "And the debts, like the sins of the fathers, shall be visited upon the children, aye, even unto the third and fourth generations."

The speeches were those of Alf Landon, the Republican presidential nominee of 1936, who turned his campaign into an attack on the New Deal and all its (public) works, including the debts that those works incurred. Despite the speeches and the John-and-Mary ad on his behalf, Alf Landon lost to Franklin Roosevelt by the widest margin in the history of presidential elections, while the congressional Republicans lost to congressional Democrats by a similarly historic margin. More