Rhyming History II: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Earlier this month I told you about a visit we made with our son to a school in northwest Illinois (Knox College) that happened to be the site of the fifth in the series of seven debates between  Steven Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The year was 1858, and the two men were running against each other for the United States Senate seat at the time occupied by Douglas. Two years later both would run against each other again, along with two other candidates for president  The Lincoln-Douglas debates have been regarded as a watershed moment in the history of American rhetoric, as both men confronted each other with arguments that helped define the struggle that tore this country apart and ultimately resulted in the Civil War.

The building known as Old Main on the campus of Konx College in Galesburg, IL
It was the site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Douglas was already a well established figure in American politics, but the debates, the contents of which were published in newspapers all over the country, brought Lincoln national attention which helped him win the 1860 presidential attention. That noteriety which included Lincoln's neagtive views of slavery, did not go unnoticed in the South. As a result, seven states, (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) seceeded from the Union just before the March 4th, 1861 innauguration of the 16th president. After Rebel forces attacked the federal garrison, Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC on April 12th of that year, four more southern states, (Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia), joined the Confederacy.

Many have put forward the notion that the primary cause for the secessession of eleven states from the Union and the war that ensued, was not slavery at all, but rather a plethora of gripes with the federal government and each state's right to confront those gripes head on, even if it meant leaving the Union if it chose. But any honest study of the history of the conflict, shows that argument to be fallacious. Judging by the Lincoln-Douglas campaign alone, so profound was the struggle over slavery, that even in a local election in a free state, hardly any other issue was addressed.

Aside from the slave owners themselves who were in it for the money, essentially there were four schools of thought regarding slavery in the United States before the Civil War. On one extreme were the people who believed that slavery was part of the natural order; i.e.; they believed that certain races were naturally superior to others and had the divine right to master over their inferiors. At the other extreme were the Abolitioinists who believed that slavery was an unequivocal wrong that should be put to an end without hesitation. The Abolitionists were radicals, the Antifa of their day. Steven Douglas and Abraham Lincoln represented the two groups in the middle, as well as the opinions of the vast majority of Americans at the time.

The concept that Douglas put his heart and soul into was "the sacred right of self-government", or the term he coined, Popular Sovereignty, the idea that it was the natural right of the people to choose their own destiny. Of course by "the people", Douglas was referring to US citizens, a distinction which in his time excluded women and except for a very few exceptions, people of color. For Douglas and like minded people, slavery was not a significant issue, other than it caused a great deal of friction in the body politic of mid-nineteenth century America. For Douglas it was the division over slavery, which he correctly envisioned would lead to Civil War, not slavery itself that was the problem. It was his firm (and erroneous) belief that the only way to eliminate the bitter struggle was to let people on a state by state basis rather than the federal government, determine which states were to allow slavery and which would not.

The last school of thought about slavery in the United States was represented by Abraham Lincoln and the new Republicans, who were an offshoot of the old, fractured Whig Party. Like the Abolitionists, Lincoln believed that slavery was ethically and morally unacceptable. Yet being a prgmatist, he understood that outright abolition would cause great upheaval and grind the economy of the American South to a halt. Instead of abolishing slavery, Lincoln favored limiting the institution to where it already existed, while steadfastly opposing expanding slavery into territories that would eventually becaome US states. That way slavery would be allowed to die out on its own, as Lincoln believed was the intention of the forefathers.

The subject of the expansion of slavery into the territories was the heart and soul of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Naturally Douglas argued that the people in the terrirories had the right to decide for themselves in which direction their territories would go. For him it was of no consequence what the decision would be.

Unlike Douglas however, the expansion of slavery in the new territories meant a great deal to many of his fellow Democrats, especially those in the southern states, who were reasonably from their point of view, quite apprehensive of slave states losing ground to free states in terms of representation in Congress.

Douglas was instrumental in the passage of the act which would open the settlement of the land west of Iowa and Missouri, There was great concern down south over the status of these new territories as according to the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery there would have been prohibited. One provision of the Douglas sponsored Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, was to repeal the part of the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery north of the 36th parallel. The white, male inhabitants of both territories would then be responsible for deciding whether to permit slavery or not. Rather than settling the issue, popular sovereignty resulted in the Kansas territory being flooded by a barrage of settlers from all ends of the ideological spectrum, all with the specific intent of trying to influence the vote. This resulting chaos led to murder and mayhem during the period known as Bloody Kansas.

In 1857, a group of pro-slavery legislators met in the territorial capital Lecompton, to draft a pro-slavery state constitution which would contradict an earlier anti-slavry draft written in Topeka, two years earlier. The later draft gained favor with then president James Buchanan, a northerner with strong sympathies to the South. As the Lecompton Constitution was fraught with serious voting irregularrrities and outright fraud before leaving Kansas for Washington, it was strongly denounced by Douglas as he felt, correctly, that it did not reflect the majority opinion of the people of the state. This put Douglas at odds with the president and his fellow Deomcrats from the South. Meanwhile his bill's repeal of the Missouri Compromise's slavery ban, was tremendously unpopular in the north, especially in his home state of Illinois. This created a tremendous opportunity for the realatively unknown Lincoln in his effort to unseat the powerful senator. 

While claiming the institution of slavery always rubbed him the wrong way, Lincoln readily admitted that prior to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it had not been a particularly important issue for him, assuming that it would be permanently restricted to the Deep South. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opening up the potential of expanding slavery to new territories,  Lincoln now understood that the wretched institution could be extended indefinitely, even into free states. That notion was confirmed by the notorious 1857 Supreme Court ruling in the case Dred Scott vs. Sandford. In a nutshell, Dred Scott, a slave, was taken by his owner into the free territory of Wisconsin whereupon Scott sued for his freedom. The case dragged on for 10 years and finally reached the nation's highest court which ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the rights of slaves as "Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.”

In his acceptance speech in the state capital of Springfield upon his nomination for the Republican candidacy to unseat Steven Douglas, Abraham Lincoln gave one of the most important and controversial speeches of his career. In that speech Lincoln conflated the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott ruling and the Lecompton Constitution as all being part of a massive government conspiracy to expand slavery in the United States. He lambasted Douglas's supposed indifference to the subject of slavery, suggesting it was a disingenuous attempt to lull the American public into tacitly accepting a practice that was inherently wrong. In doing so, whether justly or not, Lincon tied Douglas to the vast Democratic "dynasty" as part and parcel with the conspiracy. Thanks to that unholy trinity of government actions, Lincoln warned that free states like Illinois were one Supreme Court ruling away from becoming slave states:

In what cases the power of the states is so restrained by the U.S. Constitution, is left an open question, precisely as the same question, as to the restraint on the power of the territories was left open in the Nebraska act. Put that and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits. 

And this may especially be expected if the doctrine of “care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up,” shall gain upon the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a decision can be maintained when made. 

Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States.
Welcome or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown. 

We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.

That bleak possibility drove Lincoln to declare at the beginning of his speech that rather than mollify the tensions regarding slavery, those actions of the government acting in the best interests of the slave owners, only exacerbated the tension. Quoting scripture he said:

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. 

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. 

It will become all one thing, or all the other. 

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

Lincon's advisors were dead set against him delivering the speech as written, especially the parts about not enduring permanently half slave and half free  and overthrowing the dynasty, which seemed to indicate that their man  was one of them damned, dirty Abolitionists. Lincoln insisted that the rapacious actions of the government to push the agenda of expanding slavery in the territories, necessitated his harsh words.

The "House Divided Speech" would remain intact.

Douglas and Lincoln waged a tireless campaign, traveling from city to city bringing their case directly to the people. Typically the incumbent would show up in a town and his challenger would appear on the same dais a day or two later. The idea of the debates came from among others, Horace Greely, the publisher of the New York Tribune. Greely no doubt savored the idea of paper sales as thanks to the invention of the telegraph, the words of the debates featuring the well known maverick senator and his curious challenger could be wired directly to the east coast and appear in his paper almost immediately (by mid-nineteenth century standards) after they were uttered. One could say the debates marked the beginning of mass media coverage of American political campaigns. Lincoln's camp jumped at the idea of the debates as interest in a head-to-head dialog between the two candidates would bring their man national attention never dreamed of before. As for Douglas, he knew he had little to gain and everything to lose from such a confrontation. No one knows exatly why he agreed, but historian Allen G. Guelzo, the author of the book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Changed America, suggests that "The Little Giant" Douglas's nickname, was a natural gambler with an enormous ego, who never shied away from attention or a challenge.

That said, as the reluctant party, Douglas insisted on calling the shots. He set the locations, the dates, the number and the format of the debates. He would start off the first debate with one hour to state his case. That would be followed by Lincoln speaking for one and one half hour. The debate would conclude with a one half hour response from Douglas. That format would remain set throughout the seven debates with the exception of the candidates reversing the order of speakers each debate. 

The first meeting of the two candidates took place in the city of Ottawa, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. As predicted by Lincoln's advisors, Douglas came out swinging, using the House Divided speech as evidence to portray Lincoln as a radical Abolitionist intent on wiping out slavery no matter the cost:

Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks, how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? ... Now, I hold that Illinois had a right to abolish and prohibit slavery as she did, and I hold that Kentucky has the same right to continue and protect slavery that Illinois had to abolish it. I hold that New York had as much right to abolish slavery as Virginia has to continue it, and that each and every State of this Union is a sovereign power, with the right to do as it pleases upon this question of slavery, and upon all its domestic institutions. ... And why can we not adhere to the great principle of self-government, upon which our institutions were originally based. I believe that this new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds. They are trying to array all the Northern States in one body against the South, to excite a sectional war between the free States and the slave States, in order that the one or the other may be driven to the wall.

Taking his point further, Douglas goes on to, (in current parlance), play the race card.
Playing upon their fears, Douglas directly addressed the crowd (whose comments are in parenthesis) in what we would call today, a populist rant:

I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? ("No, no.") Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State, and allow the free negroes to flow in, ("never,") and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, ("no, no,") in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves? ("Never," "no.") If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. ("Never, never.") For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this Government was made on the white basis. ("Good.") I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. ("Good for you." "Douglas forever.")

Being put on the defensive from the outset of the debate, Abraham Lincoln equivocated:

...this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it, and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. (Laughter.) I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. 
I have never said anything to the contrary...

Needless to say you will not find those words inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial.
But he continues:

...I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Loud cheers.) I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.(Great applause.)

Throughout the debates, Lincoln took pains to make a distinction between civil rights, (such as the right to vote), which may come and go, and natural rights such as those defined by the Declaration of Independence. Douglas time and again countered with the fact that the man who wrote the words, "all men are created equal', Thomas Jefferson, himself owned slaves. Therefore in Douglas's estimation, Jefferson, a rational being if there ever was one, certainly must not have included black people in his equation.

Not so said Lincoln, the founding fathers while having inherited the institution of slavery if not actual slaves themselves, understood the terrible wrong of human bondage, and did everything in their power to limit and quarantine it so that one day it would die a natural death, not be perpetuated indefinitely as Douglas and the Democrats proposed.

Relief plaques of Lincoln, left and Douglas, right mark the spot where the two men squared off in an open-air debate on  Octobr 7, 1858. The debate was originally planned for the town square a few blocks away, but gale force winds forced the organizers to move the event to the campus of Knox College which was more protected from the elements. The hastily prepared speakers platform was about five feet high and partially covered the front door of the building forcing the debators to enter it by climbing through the windows, This led the self-educated Lincoln to remark "This marks the first time I've actually gone thrugh college." 

No matter how much the issue of self government or constitutional law played into it, there was one over-riding principle that was in Lincoln's mind, the bottom line as far as determining the fate of slavery. Lincoln unequivocally hammered that point home throughout the debates, first in Ottawa:

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. 

In Galesburg:

I suppose that the real difference between Judge Douglas and his friends, and the Republicans on the contrary, is that the Judge is not in favor of making any difference between slavery and liberty...and consequently every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is any wrong in slavery,... Judge Douglas declares that if any community wants slavery, they have a right to have it. He can say that, logically, if he says that there is no wrong in slavery; but if you admit that there is a wrong in it, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

And finally in Alton:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. 

In our own day of rancor and division, it is emboldening to read these words and look for parallels between the time in question, and our own. There are plenty of them, both big and small.

Here are two amusing coincidences between the 1858 Illinois Senate race and the 2016 presidential race. In both cases, the winning candidates received a last minute gift in the form of a revalation released to the public in the eleventh hour, that turned the tide of the election. We all remmeber FBI Director James Comey's last minute re-opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email issues right?. In the case of the 1858 senate race, a letter written by John Crittenden, a very influential Whig, endorsing Douglas was made public just weeks before the election. Crittenden had a very tangential personal relationship with Lincoln, he was the best man at Mary Todd Lincoln's father's second wedding. (Doesn't get much more tangential than that does it?).  Anyway in the letter Crittenden proclaimed in no uncertain terms his support for Douglas, singing high praise for The Little Giant and numerous misgivings about Lincoln, mostly related to him being a damned Abolitionist, the House Divided Speech coming back to bite its author no doubt.

Lincoln attributed his loss in the campaign at least in part to the release of the letter.

The other coincidence is that Lincoln won the popular vote of the state but managed to lose the election. Until the 17th amendment was ratified in 1913, US Senators were not elected directly by the people but rather by state representatives, much like the Electoral College is still the body that actually elects the president. Because of the particular apportionment of Illinois state representatives at the time, Douglas won the election by receiving more votes of representatives, while Lincoln received more votes of the people. Sound familiar?

There are far less trivial issues linking then and now, the following are a small helping of them.

RACISM

That word hadn't been coined in the nineteenth century, probably because the idea that certain races were superior to others was almost universally accepted. As a means of calling out individuals, calling your typical nineteenth century person a racist probably makes as much sense as calling him an "air breather." Still as we've seen, there were degrees of racism back then. Abraham Lincoln's stated opinion that black people were not the intellectual or moral equals to white people, today would place him well in step with most of today's white supremacists. But his opinion that blacks were just as entitled to the natural rights of life, liberty and the persuit of happiness, led contrmporaries like Stephen Douglas to label him a Negro lover, (not the exact term he used). For Lincoln's day, he was viewed by many as a dangerous, progressive radical. Clearly we have come a long way since then. And as we've seen in the past two years, we still have a long way to go.

Was Abraham Lincoln a Radical Progressive, 150 years ahead of his time?

FAKE NEWS

Some Americans of late have become shocked, shocked, that the sources where people derive their news could be biased and therefore not to be trusted. One current politician who shall remain nameless, has himself planted seeds of mistrust. This politician has reaped what he sowed, by taking advantage of that mistrust to convince his supporters that all news reports that portray him in a bad light are "fake news."

But he truth is, news reporting has always been biased. Here is an account from historian Allen Guelzo about the newspaper reporting of the Ottawa LinconDouglas debate:

At moments partisanship galloped so far ahead of reporting that it hardly seemed as though the papers were describing the same event. The (Republican) Tribune had Douglas "livid with passion and excitement" in his reply to Lincoln, his face "distorted with rage" and "a maniac in language and argument. " The (Democratic) Chicago Times had Lincoln so close to nervous collapse under Douglas's hammering that he could no longer stand up and had to be carried off the platform by his disheartened rescuers. 

As I mentioned above, technology was a boon to the news media in the middle nineteenth century. New technologies in the printing process made publishing available to people who a generation before could never have dreamed of owning their own newspaper, much like the internet today has given people the opportunity to broadcast their opinions to an audience never before thought imaginable. The main difference as Guelzo points out in his book is that only about five percent of American newspapers at the time of the Lincoln-Doulas debates were NOT affiliated with a political party.

Then as now, if an indiviual was truly interested in the complete picture of what was going on, he or she would have to be willing to get the news from multile sources with different points of view. My guess is that back then as now, most people were quite happy with only the news they wanted to hear.

DIVISION

We see division in this country running deeper than any time since the Civil War. There are differences to be sure between now and then, when two geographic regions of the country had a powerful, intractable, and seemingly uncompromisable gap over one controversial issue. The curious thing to me is why were so many Southerners,  the vast majority of whom did not own slaves, willing to risk everything in order to preserve an institution that everyone deep down in their hearts had to know was wrong.

My theory is that Abraham Lincoln was right when he described a conspiracy among the president, certain members of the Supreme Court including its Chief Justice, Roger Taney, and the interests of the slave owners, to expand slavery as far and wide as they possibly could. Preserving "the Southern way of Life" and its institutions (such as slavery), for these people was not a matter of principle as is so often depicted, it was all about the money. The institution of human bondage made slave owners incredibly rich. They understood that if slavery were limited  to the Deep South states, eventually their votes and interests would be vastly outnumbered in Congress by the new free states, and their way of life (in other words theur fortunes), would be doomed.

They also understood that creating division among the masses, people who didn't really have that many differences to begin with, could help their cause. In other words, if they could get the average folks of the South (who didn't own slaves), to distrust and hate their brethren up north, (most of whom ddn't care much for black folks), heck, maybe they could get some of those poor fools to fight and die for their ignoble cause if it came to that. It just so happened that they won that battle but lost the war.

Today we don't have one towering issue that divids us, we have many. We always have had our differences yet never have we been so divided. Could there be some outside force that might benefit from our divisions?

I have my suspicions but I'll just wait for the report to come out before I comment on that.

RIGHT VS. WRONG

Finally we get to the nitty gritty, the sine qua non of determining factors to settle the issues that would divide us. Some would argue that ethics and morality are all relative. They say that every culture has its own set of values and ideas about what is wrong, therefore there cannot be a universal standard of right and wrong. There's certainly a germ of truth to that but taken to its logical extreme, nothing could ever be wrong, not slavery, not rape, not even murder. Obviously the argument of moral relativity is flawed.

There certanly is a universal standard of ethical behavior that almost all of humanity can agree upon. We Christians call it the Golden Rule but truth be told, a version of the idea that you should not do anything to others that is displeasing to you, can be found in virtaully every human culture on the planet. Simply put, from an evolutionary standpoint, that is how human beings became the dominant species of life on this planet, this over-riding principle of being able to put ourselves into someone else's shoes, that enables us to form communities, work together and put aside our self-interest for the greater good. It hasn't always worked out perfectly, but it's the best we've got.

The slavery issue is an easy problem to solve as far as ethical problems go. If we subscribe to the Golden Rule or whatever you want to call it, it's not hard at all to argue that slavery is wrong because no, I would not choose to be a slave, neither would you, and neither would practically anybody else in the world. Therefore if we wouldn't want to be slaves ourselves, we should not make other people be slaves. What's more, slavery is wrong unconditionally. There are no excpetions.

Were all moral problem so easy. We grapple with many issues where there is more than one right answer, or two or more sides with conflicting "rights", such as the right of a sovereign nation to protect its borders versus the human rights of immigrants who are trying to flee oppression or are simply looking for a better life for their families. Or the rights of people to have affordable health care versus the rights of people to not have to pay for other people's health care. Or the rights of an unborn child to live versus the rights of its mother to do as she sees fit with her own body. Or the rights of a company to make a profit without the burden of unnecessary governmental regulations versus the rights of its employees to make a living wage and work in a safe environment, or the rights of the community as a whole to demand that companies do not pollute our air and our water.

Some of these issues for me are relatively easy problems, while others are heart breakingly difficult ethical dilemmas. For you, different issues may be easy or difficult. But ideally we come to solutions to these issues not out of malice, but out of  respect for one another as members of a community, and as citizens of this country and the world. As our Declaration of Independence states, there are indeed truths that are self-evident, ones that all people of good will should all be able to agree upon.

I think it is entirely approprite here to give the last word to Senator John McCain whom we lost this week. I often thought of him as a modern day Steven Douglas without the racist baggage. McCain was a fiery, passionate, cantankerous politician who like Douglas was a maverick, someone who was not afriad to challenge his party and especially its leadership when he felt it appropriate.

But earlier this year, when he realized his time on earth was short, he sat down and wrote his memoir and in the end, sounded much more like Abraham Lincoln.

Godspeed John McCain:

I'd like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations. I'd like to see us recover our sense that we're more alike than different. We're citizens of a republic made of shared ideals, forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it. Whether we think each other right or wrong in our views on the issues of the day, we owe each other our respect, as so long as our character merits respect and as long as we share for all our differences for all the rancorous debates that enliven and sometimes demean our politics, a mutual devotion to the ideals our nation was conceived to uphold, that all are created equal and liberty and equal justice are the natural rights of all. Those rights inhabit the human heart. And from there though they may be assailed, they can never be wrenched. I want to urge Americans for as long as I can to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.

A day of reckoning

Today is the day that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich gets his comeuppance. He is about to learn what if any time he will be serving in prison for the corruption charges for which he was convicted earlier this year. As a lifelong Illinois resident, I take absolutely no joy in that. Yet I will take a 180 degree turn from my comments in a previous post and say that Blgojevich should go to prison for a good amount of time. This is not out of spite or personal vendetta. What the former governor did by soliciting bribes and kickbacks for everything from appointing a new senator to helping out a children's hospital, was a tremendous violation of the public trust. It set the cause of good government, (yes Virginia, there is such a thing), back at least fifty years, and only exacerbated the terrible movement of negativity and cynicism that plagues our society.

For his part, the former governor did not show a bit of contrition or admission of guilt, at least until very recently as his date with the jailer approached. His behavior during his two corruption trials turned the proceedings into a circus side show. Letting Blagojevich off with a slap on the wrist will send a clear message to the entire political establishment that there is no accountability whatsoever when it comes to malfeasance in office.

But there's little chance he'll get off. Just a couple of weeks ago, his former confidant and fundraiser Tony Rezko got ten years for corruption under the Blgojevich administration, so it's likely that Blago will get even more time behind bars.

The smart money says 15 years. Sad to say, I don't think that's unreasonable.


Post Script: Rod Blagojevich got 14 years.

The sorry state of our state

Rod Blagojevich's conviction last week on several counts of crimes committed while he was the governor of the State of Illinois is just the latest sad chapter in the litany of our former governors going on to become convicted felons. Thanks to Blago, our state has been the joke de jour for the late night comics, and why not, we've become easy fodder as four of our last seven elected governors have ended up, or are about to end up in prison.

Which means, in the words of the Daily Show's John Stewart: "...if you take the current governor of Illinois and sit him between two former governors, chances are, he's in jail."

Ouch.

Is our state indeed the most corrupt in the nation? True, it's hard to beat our current streak of gubernatorial convictions, but I'd say that question is more difficult than meets the eye.

Policing elected officials is a little like refereeing a football game in that it is possible to call an infraction on virtually every play. A football penalty's being called depends on a number of factors, how blatant the foul, its effect on the outcome of the play, the position of the refs in relation to the foul, etc.

In politics, like football, there is a fine line between legitimacy and infraction. As I stated in my previous post, in the game of politics, quid pro quo is the name of the game, seldom is anything given by a politician that is not answered with something in return. What that something is, how it is gotten, and how it is used, define which side of the line a politician stands on.

In football, a referee is judged not only by his ability to make just and accurate calls at the appropriate time, but also his ability to remain perfectly neutral throughout a game. Unlike football, in politics the officials are not neutral, often it is the opposition that gets to throw the yellow flag. Now I'm not saying that Illinois politicians are not corrupt, far from it, but the cut throat nature of politics in this state plays just as big a role in the prosecution of elected officials, as the corruption itself.

As everyone knows, Illinois politics, like football, is a no holds barred, full contact sport. The stakes are high and competition is intense. Many successful careers in Illinois have been made out of the prosecution and conviction of politicians, and prosecutors have a huge motivation for going after them, especially the big ones. It is not unreasonable to suspect that criminal prosecutions of politicians in Illinois are based on believe it or not, politics. Here is what U.S. Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson had to say on the role of the prosecutor and the dangers that lie therein back in 1940:

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.

A more complete excerpt with a link to Jackson's entire warning to United States attorneys can be found here.

The four former governors who were prosecuted and convicted for their crimes will forever be linked together as an unfortunate lonely hearts club. But the four could not have been more different both as individuals and as leaders.

Out of fairness, I think it only reasonable to look into the actions of the four, as well as some of the governors who did not end up behind bars, and compare their legacies.

Otto Kerner had a distinguished military career and a legal career that extended beyond his role as governor. During his two terms in office, Kerner pushed through legislation dealing with progressive issues such as mental health, equal access to jobs and housing and education. He is probably best known nationally for the commission that bears his name. It was formed by President Lyndon Johnson to study the causes of unrest that led to the devastating race riots that took place in several large industrial cities throughout the United States during the sixties, and its findings were released in 1968. The commission's findings, the Kerner Report, was an indictment of segregation and racism in the U.S. Its most salient quote was:

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white - separate and unequal.

Otto Kerner resigned from office in 1968 after he was appointed appellate court judge. Kerner it turns out was in particular disfavor with the Nixon administration. In a recording between Richard Nixon and then U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell made in May of 1971, Nixon asks Micthell, if he is "going to do anything" about Kerner, then goes on to say: "I'd like to see you get him." Seven months later, U.S. Attorney and Nixon appointee James R. Thompson, prosecuted Kerner for accepting bribes while governor (in the form of discounted race track stock from the manager of a local track) and for violating a nebulous statute called honest services fraud. Later the bribery charges were dismissed and in 1987, 11 years after Kerner's death, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the honest services fraud law. Congress, using different wording quickly revived the law but last year the Supreme Court reviewed it again, and severely limited the law by a unanimous decision. Kerner's son Anton has for years been trying to clear his father's name, so far unsuccessfully.

Samuel Shapiro, Lieutenant Governor under Kerner, served out the remainder of Kerner's term but lost in the general election to Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie. Shapiro was not in office long enough to get into trouble while Ogilvie was by most accounts a very competent governor who left behind a very unpopular but necessary legacy. He established the Illinois State Income Tax.

Because of that, Ogilvie lost the following general election to a then relatively unknown Dan Walker. Walker was a bit of a renegade who, unlike his fellow Democrat Otto Kerner, was constantly at odds with the political establishment, most of all the Richard J. Daley Machine. As a result, little was accomplished during his administration. Walker the incumbent governor lost in his own party's primary (something virtually unheard of), to a Daley man, Michael Howlett. Dan Walker returned to private life where as the head of a savings and loan institution, he violated banking regulations by using his sons' names to take out personal loans in order to exceed the allowed amount. He was convicted and sent up the river. Unlike the other three convicted governors, Walker's crimes were not related to his time in public service.

The aforementioned James R. (Big Jim) Thompson, built his career upon the prosecution of Kerner and higher ups in the Daley administration, mostly by using the discredited honest services fraud statute. By the mid-seventies, the public had become fed up with the shenanigans of elected officials and during Thompson's reign as U.S. Attorney, he became something of a local folk hero. In the gubernatorial election of 1976 Thompson defeated Howlett in a landslide and served for an unprecedented four terms as governor. His greatest legacy besides the prosecution of Kerner, was the construction of the state office building Chicago's Loop, the Helmut Jahn monstrosity known appropriately enough as the James R. Thompson Center.

Thompson's successor was fellow Republican, Jim Edgar. Edgar had the benefit of a Republican controlled State Assembly resulting in administrative success in pushing through his agenda. In addition he was a moderate who enjoyed popularity on both sides of the aisle. His administration was largely free of controversy and scandal and to this day he is considered favorably as an elder statesman of his party, and his name continues to be brought up as a possible future candidate.

His successor George Ryan by contrast, began his administration under a cloud of suspicion from his days as Illinois Secretary of State. There had been rumors afloat that there were members of that office under Ryan's watch who had accepted bribes in exchange for driver's licenses. Ryan for the most part during his early administration remained unscathed as no one could finger him in any of the misdeeds. George Ryan was the very picture of the well connected old time politician, a party apparatchik who would have fit right in with the Democratic Machine of Richard J. Daley, had he not been from Downstate Illinois where everybody is Republican. Gradually the license for bribes scandal caught up with Ryan and he did not seek a second term. He was eventually charged with numerous counts of fraud related to the scandal, and other misdeeds involving the personal misuse of campaign funds for his and his family's personal use. He was convicted on all counts and currently resides in the federal penitentiary. Ironically, Ryan's defense was conducted pro bono by the firm headed by none other than Big Jim Thompson.

If one were to measure the gravity of Illinois gubernatorial misdeeds in terms of the direct effects they had on the state and its citizens, Ryan's would win hands down. The most notorious example, the incident that started the investigations in the first place, was a tragedy that occurred in 1994 on Interstate 94 in Wisconsin. Six children from one family were killed when the van in which they were traveling struck debris that came off a truck, then crashed and burned. It turned out the driver of the truck received his license through a bribe to an employee of the Secretary of State's office. While it's a stretch to blame Ryan personally for the children's deaths, the enormity of the tragedy that occurred thirteen years earlier, certainly had a huge impact in his trial.

However, just as his crimes touched Illinois residents most directly, so did some of his accomplishments as governor, perhaps more than any of those mentioned above, and certainly far more than the one yet to be mentioned. The Ryan administration committed record funding to education, as well as to public transportation and highway infrastructure. Of his accomplishments, he will be most remembered as the man who imposed the moratorium of the Illinois death penalty. It was known for a long time that our penal system was terribly flawed and several prisoners on death row had been proven innocent through the new technology of DNA profiling. While Ryan himself was by no means an opponent of the death penalty, he understood that it was better to not execute murderers than to take the life of a single innocent person. Just before leaving office, Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 death row inmates to life in prison.

For this action, Ryan received worldwide notoriety, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Those who opposed the moratorium, mostly Ryan's former supporters, claimed that Ryan was merely trying to bolster up his legacy in light of the impending charges against him. I find this to be unlikely. The moratorium was an unpopular act, as most Illinois citizens are in favor of capital punishment. If he truly wanted to gain the public's favor there were far easier issues he could have advocated, say, free bus rides for senior citizens.

Popular or not, George Ryan's action on capital punishment was the correct one in my opinion, and I applaud him for that. It was one of the boldest and bravest moves by any Illinois governor, ever. Adding to his legacy whether he wants it or not, this past week the state of Illinois formally abolished its death penalty.

Then came Rod Blagojevich. He was as different from George Ryan as Ryan was from Jim Edgar except in one respect; Blago and Ryan will likely both be in prison at the same time. Brash, cocky, self assured Blago always went his own way, much to the detriment of the people of Illinois. He couldn't get along with anyone that mattered, not because of ideological differences as was the case with Dan Walker, but just because he was well, Rod Blagojevich. If George Ryan's actions had a real effect on the people of this state, both positive and negative, Blagojevich's had none. He billed himself as the voice of the little guy, but most of the legislation he did manage to get through the legislature was window dressing at best, popular but of little substance or consequence. Even before his corruption investigations, Blagojevich's approval ratings were historically low.

The expletive filled tapes obtained by court ordered FBI wiretaps that were presented in his two trials, portray a man who was obsessed with his own power and personal gain. They show utter contempt for the concept of "public service." In the several counts against him, what really nailed Blagojevich was his attempt to sell the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he was elected president in 2008. Blago's words recorded on tape: "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden. I'm just not giving it up for fucking nothing," will no doubt follow him to his grave, and beyond.

Yet for all the sleaze, the Feds did not prove that Blago actually received anything in return for all his dubious efforts. This was in fact the basis behind his defense, and it may still add him some points in his appeal. His solicitations for bribes, like the entirety of his administration, added up to nothing.

So to add it all up, we have in our convict club one good governor, Kerner, who made a dumb mistake while in office, and was likely brought down by a vindictive, thoroughly corrupt administration in Washington, one ineffective governor, Walker, who did not betray the public trust while in office, and one old school governor, Ryan, whose accomplishments will forever be overshadowed because he forgot that times had changed and the public didn't look kindly anymore on an elected official dipping into the till.

Then we have Rod Blagojevich, who without his crimes, probably would have gone down in history as the worst governor in Illinois history.

With last week's convictions, he's a sure thing.

And we voters of Illinois elected him, not once, but twice, so I guess we got what we deserved.

You think this was bad...

The passing over the weekend of Ted Sorensen, coming on the heels of the current election cycle begs obvious comparisons between the politics of the past and the politics of today. Sorensen was best known as one of President Kennedy's chief aids as well as the speechwriter responsible for some of the most memorable, eloquent and poetic phrases in the annals of U.S. political history. From Kennedy's inaugural address, Sorenson is responsible for this:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

And of course, this:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Refreshing isn't it to read after listening to politicians with little or no vision of their own resorting to the most viscous attacks on their opponents for the past six months.

Every year the pundits and public alike decry that campaigns get dirtier and dirtier and politicians wring their hands and say something must be done to stop this. Then comes another election cycle and more of the same.

By far the most atrocious ad that I heard this year was one that urged voters not to approve the retention of Illinois State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Kilbride. In the ad, actors read first person accounts of criminals recounting their crimes. One began: "I sexually assaulted a woman and her daughter, slit their throats and burned them..." It then continued: "...but Judge Kilbride let me off." The ad was sponsored by a special interest group that opposed the judge's rulings on placing caps on malpractice suits, but apparently felt that this angle was more likely to get voters' attention.

It turned out that Justice Kilbride won another term to the state's highest court, but only after waging what turned out to be the most expensive campaign for that post in the state's history. He won with 65 percent of the votes in the affirmative, (he needed 60 percent). One can only assume that many of the the 35 percent who cast no votes (an unusually high number) were influenced by that ad.

The fact is that ads that play on people's fears, despicable as they are, work. Who can forget Willy Horton?

Or this, perhaps the most shamefully manipulative, and effective political ad ever.

Lyndon Johnson won that election by a landslide, thereby sparing the little daisy girl and the rest of us from Armageddon.

Attack ads have been with us since the beginning. Looking at some of the mud that was slung during 19th Century campaigns makes today's political discourse look like an afternoon social.

What I find startling in reading Kennedy's speech so beautifully crafted by Sorensen, is the call to commitment and sacrifice that stands in marked contrast to what we typically hear from office seekers of today.

The utter self-interest that has dominated the current election season is appalling and disheartening to me. Certainly no one wants to pay higher taxes, especially during tough economic times. It seems inconceivable however that higher taxes are not in our future as the government, especially at the state level, is fast becoming insolvent. Yet I can think of only one candidate in Illinois at least, who openly admitted this in his campaign.

No, the current mantra is "lower taxes and cut spending." This is music to the ears of much of another generation, born after depression and war, tempered at least until recently by prosperity and as a result, lacks discipline, is practically ignorant of its heritage, and is more than willing to let go of hard fought human rights that it feels do not directly concern it.

Well let's see, where do we cut the spending? How about education. People without kids have always griped about having to pay for others' kids' education. Never mind that children whether they're ours or not are our future.

What about public transportation? Folks who drive everywhere continually moan about paying for transportation they don't use, conveniently forgetting that infrastructure that allows them to drive their cars also costs a lot of money. Then how about cutting spending on roads? No way!

Security and defense cuts are OK for some until something terrible happens and then comes the universal cry: "why didn't we do anything to prevent it!"

One of the most appalling suggestions that has been bandied about frequently in the "let's cut the budget" ads has been to cut the pensions of state workers. People working in the public sector have been getting a bad rap lately and this message resounds with the anti-government crowd.

Of course if anyone suggested cutting the pensions that they themselves worked so hard for so many years to accumulate, the anti-govs would cry bloody murder.

And so it goes, "balance the budget, cut the stuff I don't need, and whatever you do, don't raise my taxes", is the rallying cry of a growing segment of the population whose political power appears to be gaining momentum.

It gives me pause to reflect on the words of that tremendous speech delivered almost fifty years ago. They inspire us to greater heights through hope and promise by encouraging us to work together for the greater good of the world, not just for ourselves.

One "sound bite" comes particularly to mind that stands chillingly in contrast to the muck we've been thrown in the past few months:

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. (emphasis mine)

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I think those are good words to reflect upon today, cleansing our pallets after months of empty promises, lies, accusations, disinformation, and if I dare say it, an all out fear and hatred of those with different opinions.

For those of us who are particularly appalled and relieved that the election is over, all I can say is this: just wait a few months when the arduous presidential campaign begins in earnest.

In the words of Al Jolson:

Folks, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Drop the Burris issue...

State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias was on the radio this morning urging the state to carry out a general election to replace Senator Roland Burris. When asked if he would back the election even if it would cost the financially strapped state over 50 million dollars, Giannoulias stuck to his guns claiming; "we need to put some integrity back in the process."

And guess who he thinks is the right guy for the job?

Why himself of course.

Now I'm in favor of integrity in politicians as much as the next guy. I'm also in favor of free public transportation, peace, love and understanding and all that, but I don't expect to see any of those things in my lifetime.

Show me a politician who wouldn't do just about anything short of stabbing his own mother in the back to get votes and I'll show you a losing politician. Which is why of course Carolyn Kennedy dropped out of the running for her own Senate appointment. She just couldn't stomach the crap she'd have to put up with trying to win an election. Few of us could.

As far as the integritometer rating on Burris, compared with his new colleagues in the Senate, my suspicion is he'd come in somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Giannoulias for his part said he's done a terrific job as Treasurer, a curious claim given the current state of the state. Of course the Treasurer can't be held personally liable for the financial troubles of the state. But anyone who has a connection with the train wreck that is Illinois State government these days has to be held suspect. Especially the guy who holds the purse strings.

While he may have an in at the White House as the president's go to guy on the basketball court, I think Alexi had better keep a low profile or else he and his party will have a day of reckoning at the polls if a general election is held any time soon. In this climate a Democrat in Illinois has about as much chance of winning statewide as Blago has any chance of getting elected to ... well anything.

And God knows that the state and federal governments have more pressing matters right now than replacing our current senator.

So let's stick with Burris to keep the seat warm in Washington and in two years the voters will throw the bum out.

And elect another one.