Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Is Sarah Palin the 21st Century Andrew Jackson?



At first glance it might seem incongruous to draw a comparison between Sarah Palin and Andrew Jackson.  And I am not comparing their abilities nor what they stood for. But I do believe there are similarities to the type of “celebritician” that she is and he was.

It is generally agreed that Sarah Palin got the attention of the nation with her Vice Presidential race in 2008 and then proceeded with her book and her reality travelogue TV show to become a celebrity.  The Fox news gig was more an effort to give her some credentials than to create the celebrity status.  

In the 19th century Andrew Jackson was in many ways one of America’s’ first celebrities.  He won the Battle of New Orleans (fought after the Peace treaty had been signed but before he or others in America knew that.)  As a youngster he had been scarred by a British soldier sword during the Revolution.  And he was a hero of Indian wars in the old southwest.  These facts were known throughout the country through the newspapers which were posted in general stores and on boards at town squares.

Political negatives about Jackson were simply overlooked.  As a Congressman he had voted against a resolution praising George Washington.  And he had resigned his office as US Senator from Tennessee and later as territorial Governor of Florida. (Sarah Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska in midterm) These matters were not made an issue when he ran for President in 1824. 

The Washington DC elite (there was no Beltway then) didn’t like Jackson.  They considered him uncouth, poorly educated, somewhat brazen in his mannerisms and unsophisticated.  Yet the people voted for him in 1824 - he didn’t win enough electoral votes, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives where the establishment chose John Quincy Adams, son of the 2nd President.  But Jackson remained the idol of many Americans -- the personification of the new west of the nation (in those days Tennessee was the West) and he was able to win election in 1828 defeating incumbent President Adams.

Sarah Palin is lampooned by the media, liberal and moderate, as relatively uneducated, not well read, somewhat unsophisticated and somewhat brazen in her mannerisms (shooting a caribou for example -- of course Jackson was pilloried for having shot a man and not in battle).  Palin is criticized for much of what she tweets and what she says.  Jackson was notorious for saying what he thought in simple terms although the most famous are occasions that occurred after he became President (like when he supposedly said of Chief Justice Marshall’s Supreme Court decision that barred moving the Cherokee and Creek Indians to lands west of the Mississippi – “Marshall made his decision now let him enforce it”

Palin is considered the darling of the non-establishment Republicans: the evangelical right, the Tea Partiers, the working class rural voters, the soccer moms.  Jackson was seen as the symbolic leader of the “men on the make” the workingmen of the cities, the poorer farmers and the entrepreneurs of the new cities and states of the northwest and the southwest.

General Jackson was not supported in 1824 by the establishment leaders of his party (although by that point there may have been only one amalgamated national party more a label than an apparatus).  Jefferson rooted for John Quincy Adams and so likely did Madison and Monroe.  The plantation owners and big city merchants and the ruling money elites were appalled by Jackson and felt threatened by a possible Jackson victory.

You can see the same attitude in the response of the establishment to a Sarah Palin win. It has to be ridiculed and made unthinkable.  But clearly that is not so to millions of Americans. And if Republicans vote for her in the primaries, the party establishment will fold as it always does in national party situations and will accept her candidacy as the establishment did in 1828, finally, of Jackson.

I think Andrew Jackson was the most significant American President between Jefferson and Lincoln and certainly the third most important president of his century.  I am not suggesting that Sarah Palin as President could be another Andrew Jackson.  I doubt she has the staying power and the intellectual capacities that Jackson had. But, those who underestimate her ability to win a party nomination and/or an election would do well to learn their history and see how often this country has turned to persons who the intelligentsia at the time downplayed (Walter Lippmann referred to FDR as a ‘third rate intellect”).  Democrats who wish for Palin’s nomination because they think she is the easiest to beat in 2012 had best be careful what they wish for. 

Most political prognosticators, and I think historians, would agree that Sarah Palin’s chances of defeating President Obama are much slighter than were Jackson’s of defeating Pres. Adams.  So it well may be that like Jackson’s nemesis Henry Clay, Sarah Palin can win her party’s nomination but not the Presidency.  And like the last Populist, evangelical, fundamentalist Presidential candidate, who thrice won the Democratic nomination and dominated his party for thirty years, she can’t win the Presidency.  So she may end up being the 21st century version of William Jennings Bryan not Andrew Jackson.

7 June 2011

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