History of Democrats, details posted on http://www.honeyshack.net/discussions.
This
book is a MUST READ for every Democrate and Republican alike, Whites, blacks
and Racist Democrats by Rev. perryman.
HISTORY DOES REPEAT ITSELF and if you are so arrogant as to forget the
past, it will climb up and bite you in the ass.
History
of the Democratic Party, it was formed to keep slavery in effect, history of
Republicans, it was formed to end slavery, who started the Civil War? States
that seceded the union over Lincoln's stance on slavery, this Democratic Stance
on slavery, fired the shot at Ft. Sumter. Democrats NEVER apologizing
for the stances they have had and still have, to enslave the people and
control. Just step back and listen, who is slandering, who has committed fraud,
who isn't paying taxes, who is out right lying, Who voted for Govt run
healthcare, auto bail out, banking bailout, wall street bailout? Majority
Democrats
Democrats NEVER apologizing for the stances they have had and still have,
to enslave the people and control. Just step back and listen, who is
slandering, who has committed fraud, who isn't paying taxes, who is out right
lying, Who voted for Govt run healthcare, auto bail out, banking bailout, wall
street bailout? Majority Democrats
Does anyone realize who cut recent funding (82 mil) to
the black colleges? Obama. Who founded NAACP? White men, who founded Negro
College fund? White men. Wake up people, be enslaved forever or wake up,
stand up and get off the nipple
1909, as an answer to the lynchings and other racist
practices by Democrats, three whites came together and formed a new
organization, NAACP……
There
have been several discussions on the subject of race, most of which focused on
the relationship between blacks and whites but seldom have we ever explored the
role politics played in the establishing our racist society.
HISTORIANS report that one political party supported slavery and Jim Crow while
the other party opposed them. For over
150 years, blacks were victims of terrorist attacks by the Democrats and their
Klan supporters, including lynching, beating, rapes and mutilations.
On the issue of slavery,
the Democrats literally gave their lives to expand it; the Republicans gave
their lives to ban it.
History reveals the democrats didn't fall in love with black folks, they
fell in love with the black vote knowing this would be their ticket into the
white house
In Obama's book: Dreams From My Father, then Senator Barack Hussein Obama makes
the connection between politics and racism when he tells his readers how white
Chicago Democrats vowed to vote Republican before they would vote for a black
man (Harold Washington) to be Mayor of Chicago. The modern
Democratic Party was formed in the 1830s from factions of the Democratic-Republican
Party, which had largely collapsed by 1824.
Van
Buren was a key organizer of the Democratic Party, also a dominant
figure in the Second Party System, he was a key figure in
building the organizational structure for Jacksonian democracy, particularly in New York
State. More broadly, the term refers to the period of the Second Party System (mid 1830s-1854) when
Jacksonian philosophy was ascendant as well as the spirit of that era. It can
be contrasted with the characteristics of Jeffersonian democracy.
In contrast to the Jeffersonian
era, Jacksonian democracy promoted the strength of the presidency and executive
branch at the expense of Congress, while also seeking to broaden the
public's participation in government. They demanded elected (not appointed)
judges and rewrote many state constitutions to reflect the new
values. In national terms the
Jacksonians favored geographical expansion, justifying it in terms of Manifest
Destiny. There was usually a consensus among both Jacksonians and Whigs
that battles over slavery should be avoided. The
Jacksonian Era lasted roughly from
Van Buren allied himself with the
Clintonian faction of the Democratic-Republican Party, and was
surrogate of Columbia County from 1808 until 1813,
when he was removed. He also served as a
member of the state constitutional convention,
where he opposed the grant of universal suffrage and tried to maintain property
requirements for voting.
He was the
leading figure in the Albany Regency, a group of politicians who for more
than a generation dominated much of the politics of New York and powerfully
influenced the politics of the nation. The group, together with the political
clubs such as Tammany Hall that were developing at the same time,
played a major role in the development of the "spoils
system", a recognized procedure in national, state and local affairs, (also known as a patronage system)
is a practice where a political party, after winning an election, gives
government jobs to its voters as a reward for working toward victory, and as an
incentive to keep working for the party—as opposed to a system of awarding
offices on the basis of some measure of merit independent of
political activity.
The term was derived from the
phrase "'to the victor belong the spoils" by New York Senator William
L. Marcy, referring to the victory of the Jackson
Democrats in the election of 1828.
Van Buren was the prime architect of
the first nationwide political party: the Jacksonian Democrats. In Van Buren's own words, "Without
strong national political organizations, there would be nothing to moderate the
prejudices between free and slaveholding states."
In February 1821,
Martin Van Buren was elected a U.S. Senator from New York, Van Buren at first favored internal
improvements, such as road repairs and canal creation, therefore proposing a
constitutional amendment in 1824 to authorize such undertakings. The next year,
however, he took ground against them. He voted for the tariff of 1824 then gradually abandoned
the protectionist position, coming out for "tariffs for revenue only."
It took Van Buren and his partisan
friends a decade and a half to form the Democratic Party. Martin Van Buren was the first real American
politician and was also the first to use grassroots campaigning in his
presidential campaign. He wanted to make a political party that united the
plain republicans of the north and the planters of the south.
He succeeded
in setting up a system of bonds for the national debt. His party was so split
that his 1837 proposal for an "Independent Treasury" system did not
pass until 1840. It gave the Treasury control of all federal funds and had a
legal tender clause that required (by 1843) all payments to be made in War, but
it further inflamed public opinion on both sides.
In a bold
step, Van Buren reversed Andrew Jackson's policies and sought peace at home, as
well as abroad. Instead of settling a financial dispute between American
citizens and the Mexican government by force, Van Buren wanted to seek a
diplomatic solution. In August 1837, Van Buren denied Texas' formal request to
join the United States, again prioritizing sectional harmony over territorial
expansion. In the case of the ship Amistad,
Van Buren sided with the Spanish Government to return the kidnapped
slaves. Also, he oversaw the "Trail
of Tears", which involved the expulsion
of the Cherokee,
Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and
Seminole
from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South
Carolina to the Oklahoma territory. To help secure Florida, Van
Buren also pursued the Second Seminole War, which had begun while
Jackson was in office. The war, which would prove the costliest of the Indian Wars,
was highly unpopular in the free states, where it was seen as an attempt to expand slave territory. Fighting was not
resolved until 1842, after Van Buren had left office.
Van Buren entered the presidency not
only as the heir to Jackson's policies, Jefferson's ideology of limited
government, and Smith's principles of political economy, but also an
accomplished politician with a statesman like vision of the dangers facing the
nation. This complex heritage would shape the new president's response to the
multiple challenges of 1837.
On Slavery
Though he did vote against the admission of Missouri as a
slave state, and though he would be the nominated presidential candidate of the
Free Soil Party, an anti-slavery political party, in 1848, there was no
ambiguity in his position on the abolition of slavery during his term of
office. When it came to the issue of
slavery in DC and slavery in the United States, he was against its abolition,
and said so in his Inaugural Address in 1836: "the institution of domestic
slavery"... "I believed it a solemn duty fully to make known my
sentiments in regard to it, and now, when every motive for misrepresentation
has passed away, I trust that they will be candidly weighed and
understood."
"I must go into the Presidential chair the
inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress
to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the
slaveholding States, and also with a determination equally decided to resist
the slightest interference with it in the States where it exists
1837
cartoon shows Democratic Party as donkey
The spirit of
Jacksonian Democracy animated the party from
the early 1830s to the 1850s, shaping the Second Party System, with the Whig Party the main opposition. After the disappearance of the Federalists
after 1815, and the Era of Good Feelings (1816-24), there was a
hiatus of weakly organized personal factions until about 1828-32, when the
modern Democratic Party emerged along with its rival the new Whig Party. The new Democratic Party
became a coalition of farmers, city-dwelling laborers, and Irish Catholics. It
was weakest in New England, but strong everywhere else and won most
national elections thanks to strength in New York, Pennsylvania,
Virginia (by
far, the most populous states at the time), and the frontier. Democrats opposed
elites and aristocrats, the Bank of the United States, and the
whiggish modernizing programs that would build up industry at the expense of
the yeoman or
independent small farmer.
From
1828 to 1848, banking and tariffs were the central domestic policy issues.
Democrats strongly favored expansion to new farm lands, as typified by their
expulsion of eastern American Indians and
acquisition of vast amounts of new land in the West after 1846. The party
favored the War with Mexico and opposed anti-immigrant nativism, Nativism typically means opposition to immigration or efforts to
lower the political or legal status of specific ethnic or cultural groups
because the groups are considered hostile or alien to the natural culture, and
it is assumed that they cannot be assimilated.
Both
Democrats and Whigs were divided on the issue of slavery. In the 1830s, the Locofocos in
New York City were radically democratic, anti-monopoly, and were proponents of hard money and free trade.
Their chief spokesman was William Leggett. At this time labor
unions were few; some were loosely affiliated with the party.
Jackson's
vice-president, Martin Van Buren, won the presidency in 1836, but the Panic
of 1837 caused his defeat in 1840 at the hands of the
Whig ticket of General William Henry Harrison and John Tyler;
the Democrats got it back in 1844 with James
K. Polk. Polk lowered tariffs, set up a sub-treasury system, and began and
directed the Mexican-American War, in which the United
States acquired much of the modern-day American Southwest. The war was strongly opposed
by most Whigs, such as Illinois Congressman Abraham
Lincoln.)
The Democratic National Committee (DNC)
was created in 1848 at the convention
that nominated General Lewis Cass, who lost to General Zachary
Taylor of the Whigs. A major cause
of the defeat was that the new Free
Soil Party, which opposed slavery expansion, split the Democratic Party,
particularly in New York, where the electoral votes went to Taylor. Democrats in Congress passed the hugely
controversial Compromise of 1850. In state after state,
however, the Democrats gained small but permanent advantages over the Whig
Party, which finally collapsed in 1852, fatally weakened by division on slavery
and nativism. The fragmented opposition could not
stop the election of Democrats Franklin
Pierce in 1852 and James
Buchanan in 1856.
Young America
Eyal (2007)
argues that the 1840s and 1850s were the heyday of a new faction of young
Democrats called "Young America." Led by Stephen
Douglas, James K. Polk and Franklin
Pierce, and New York financier August
Belmont, this faction explains, broke with the agrarian and strict
constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology,
regulation, reform, and internationalism. The movement attracted a circle of
outstanding writers, including William Cullen Bryant, George
Bancroft, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. They sought independence from European
standards of high culture and wanted to demonstrate the excellence and
exceptionalism of America’s own literary tradition.
In economic
policy Young America saw the necessity of a modern infrastructure with
railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, and harbors; they endorsed the "market
revolution" and promoted capitalism. They called for
Congressional land grants to the states, which allowed Democrats to claim that
internal improvements were locally rather than federally sponsored. Young
America claimed that modernization would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jeffersonian Democracy by allowing yeomen
farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper. They tied internal
improvements to free trade, while accepted moderate tariffs as a necessary
source of government revenue. They supported the Independent Treasury (the
Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States) not as a scheme
to quash the special “privilege”of the Whiggish monied elite, but as a device
to spread prosperity to all Americans.
Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age: 1854-1896
In 1854,
despite strong protest, the main Democratic leader in the Senate, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois,
pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Although it was not the
initial purpose of the act, it established that settlers could vote to decide
to allow or not allow slavery. Against the backdrop of the slavery issue, a
major re-alignment took place among voters and politicians, with new issues,
new parties, and new rules. The Whig Party dissolved entirely. While the
Democrats survived, many northern Democrats (especially Free
Soilers from 1848) joined the newly established Republican Party.
Buchanan split the party on the issue of slavery in Kansas when he attempted to
pass a Federal slave code; most Democrats in the North rallied to Stephen A.
Douglas, who believed that a Federal slave code would be undemocratic.
The
Democratic Party was unable to compete with the Republican Party, which
controlled nearly all northern states by 1860, bringing a solid majority in the
electoral college. The Republicans claimed that the northern Democrats,
including Doughfaces
such as Pierce and Buchanan, and advocates of popular sovereignty such as
Stephen A. Douglas and Lewis Cass, were accomplices to Slave Power.
The Republicans argued that slaveholders had seized control of the federal
government and were blocking the progress of liberty.
To
vote for Douglas in Virginia, a man had to deposit the ticket in the official
ballot box.
In 1860 the Democrats were unable to
stop the election of Republican Abraham
Lincoln, even as they feared his election would lead to the Civil War. The party split in two, with the
northern wing nominating Douglas and the southern wing nominating Vice
President John C. Breckinridge. Douglas campaigned
across the country and came in second in the popular vote, but carried only
Missouri and New Jersey. Breckinridge carried 11 slave
states.
During the Civil War, Northern Democrats divided into two
factions, the War Democrats, who supported the military policies of
President Lincoln, and the Copperheads, who strongly opposed them. During the Civil
War, no party politics were allowed in the Confederacy as the Democratic Party there was dominant, but partisanship flourished in the North. After the attack on Ft. Sumter, Douglas
rallied northern Democrats behind the Union, but when Douglas died, the party
lacked an outstanding figure in the North.
The
Democratic Party did well in the 1862 congressional elections,
but in 1864 it nominated General
George McClellan, a War Democrat, on a peace
platform, and lost badly because many War Democrats bolted to National Union candidate Abraham
Lincoln. In the 1866 elections, the Radical Republicans won two-thirds
majorities in Congress and took control of national affairs. Ulysses
S. Grant led the Republicans to landslides in 1868 and 1872.
The Democrats
lost consecutive presidential elections from 1860 through 1880 (1876 was in dispute) and did not
win the presidency until 1884. The party was weakened by its record of
opposition to the war but nevertheless benefited from white Southerners'
resentment of Reconstruction and consequent
hostility to the Republican Party. The nationwide
depression of 1873 allowed the Democrats to retake control of the House in
the 1874 Democratic landslide. The Redeemers
gave the Democrats control of every Southern state (by the Compromise of 1877); the disenfranchisement
of blacks took place 1890-1900. From 1880 to 1960 the "Solid South"
voted Democratic in presidential elections (except 1928). After 1900, a victory
in a Democratic primary was "tantamount to election" because the
Republican Party was so weak in the South.
Although
Republicans continued to control the White House until 1884, the Democrats
remained competitive, especially in the mid-Atlantic and lower Midwest, and
controlled the House of Representatives for most of that period. In the
election of 1884, Grover
Cleveland, the reforming Democratic Governor of New York, won the
Presidency, a feat he repeated in 1892, having lost in the election
of 1888.
Typewriters
were new in 1893 and this Gillam cartoon from Puck shows that Cleveland
can't get the Democratic "machine" to work as the keys (key
politicians) won't respond to his efforts.
Cleveland was
the leader of the Bourbon Democrats. They represented business interests, supported
banking and railroad goals, promoted laissez-faire
capitalism, opposed imperialism and U.S. overseas expansion, opposed the
annexation of Hawaii,
fought for the gold standard, and opposed Bimetallism.
They strongly supported reform movements such as Civil Service Reform and opposed
corruption of city bosses, leading the fight against the Tweed Ring.
The leading Bourbons included Samuel
J. Tilden, David Bennett Hill and William C. Whitney of New York, Arthur
Pue Gorman of Maryland, Thomas
F. Bayard of Delaware, William L. Wilson of West Virginia, John Griffin Carlisle of Kentucky, William F. Vilas of Wisconsin, J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, John M. Palmer of Illinois, Horace
Boies of Iowa, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar
of Mississippi, and railroad builder James
J. Hill of Minnesota. A prominent intellectual was Woodrow
Wilson. The Bourbons were in power when the Panic
of 1893 hit, and they took the blame. A fierce struggle inside the party
ensued, with catastrophic losses for both the Bourbon and agrarian factions in
1894, leading to the showdown in 1896.
Ethnocultural Politics: pietistic Republicans versus
liturgical Democrats
Religious
divisions were sharply drawn. Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians,
Scandinavian Lutherans and other pietists in the North were closely linked to the Republican
Party. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics,
Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for
protection from pietistic
moralism, especially prohibition. Both parties cut
across the class structure, with the Democrats gaining more support from the
lower classes and Republicans more support from the upper classes.
Cultural
issues, especially prohibition and foreign language schools, became matters of
contention because of the sharp religious divisions in the electorate. In the
North, about 50 percent of voters were pietistic Protestants (Methodists,
Scandinavian Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ)
who believed the government should be used to reduce social sins, such as
drinking. Liturgical churches (Roman Catholics, German Lutherans,
Episcopalians) comprised over a quarter of the vote and wanted the government
to stay out of the morality business. Prohibition debates and referendums
heated up politics in most states over a period of decade, as national
prohibition was finally passed in 1918 (and repealed in 1932), serving as a
major issue between the wet Democrats and the dry GOP.
The Free Silver Movement
Bryan
at age 36 was the youngest candidate; October 1896
Grover
Cleveland led the party faction of conservative, pro-business Bourbon
Democrats, but as the depression of 1893 deepened, his enemies multiplied. At the 1896 convention the
silverite-agrarian faction repudiated the president, and nominated the
crusading orator William Jennings Bryan on a platform of free
coinage of silver. The idea was that
minting silver coins would flood the economy with cash and end the depression. Cleveland supporters formed the National Democratic Party
(Gold Democrats), which attracted politicians and intellectuals (including Woodrow
Wilson and Frederick Jackson Turner) who refused to
vote Republican.
Bryan, an
overnight sensation because of his "Cross
of Gold" speech, waged a new-style crusade against the supporters of
the gold standard. Criss-crossing the Midwest and East by special train-—he was
the first candidate since 1860 to go on the road- - - - he gave over 500
speeches to audiences in the millions. In St. Louis he gave 36 speeches to workingmen's
audiences across the city, all in one day. Most Democratic newspapers were
hostile toward Bryan, but he seized control of the media by making the news
every day, as he hurled thunderbolts against Eastern monied interests. The
rural folk in the South and Midwest were ecstatic, showing an enthusiasm never
before seen. Ethnic Democrats, especially Germans and Irish, however, were
alarmed and frightened by Bryan. The middle classes, businessmen, newspaper
editors, factory workers, railroad workers, and prosperous farmers generally
rejected Bryan's crusade. McKinley promised a return to prosperity based on the
gold standard, support for industry, railroads and banks, and pluralism that
would enable every group to move ahead. Although Bryan lost the election in a
landslide, he did win the hearts and minds of a majority of Democrats. The
victory of the Republican Party in the election of 1896 marked the start
of the "Progressive Era," from 1896 to 1932, in which the Republican
Party usually was dominant.
Bryan, Wilson, and the Progressive Era: 1896–1932
The 1896
election marked a political realignment in which the Republican Party
controlled the presidency for 28 of 36 years. The Republicans dominated most of
the Northeast and Midwest, and half the West. Bryan, with a base in the South
and Plains states, was strong enough to get the nomination in 1900 (losing to
McKinley) and 1908 (losing to Taft). Theodore Roosevelt dominated the first decade of
the century, and to the annoyance of Democrats "stole" the trust
issue by crusading against trusts.
Theodore Roosevelt steals the anti-trust issue
from the Democrats, 1904
Anti-Bryan
conservatives controlled the convention in 1904, but faced a Theodore Roosevelt
landslide. Bryan dropped his free silver and anti-imperialism rhetoric and
supported mainstream progressive issues, such as the income tax, anti-trust,
and direct election of Senators. He backed Woodrow
Wilson in 1912, was rewarded with the State Department, then resigned in
protest against Wilson's non-pacifistic policies in 1916. Northern Democrats
were progressive on most issues, but generally opposed prohibition, were lukewarm
regarding women's suffrage, and were reluctant to undercut the "boss
system" in the big cities.
Taking
advantage of a deep split in the Republican Party, the Democrats took control
of the House in 1910, and elected the intellectual reformer Woodrow
Wilson in 1912 and 1916. Wilson successfully led Congress to a series of
progressive laws, including a reduced
tariff, stronger antitrust laws, new programs for farmers,
hours-and-pay benefits for railroad workers, and the outlawing of child labor
(which was reversed by the Supreme Court). Wilson ordered the segregation of
the federal Civil Service. Furthermore, bipartisan constitutional
amendments for prohibition and women's suffrage were passed in his second term.
In effect, Wilson laid to rest the issues of tariffs, money and antitrust that
had dominated politics for 40 years. Wilson oversaw the U.S. role in the First
World War, and helped write the Versailles
Treaty, which included the League
of Nations. But in 1919 Wilson's
political skills faltered, and suddenly everything turned sour. The Senate rejected Versailles and the League,
a nationwide wave of strikes and violence caused unrest, and Wilson's health
collapsed.
At the 1924 Democratic National Convention,
a resolution denouncing the white-supremacist Ku Klux
Klan was introduced by forces allied with Al Smith and Oscar W. Underwood in order to embarrass the
front-runner, William Gibbs McAdoo. After much debate, the resolution failed by a
single vote. The KKK faded away soon after, but the deep split in the party
over cultural issues, especially Prohibition, facilitated Republican landslides
in 1920, 1924, and 1928. However, Al Smith did
build a strong Catholic base in the big cities in 1928, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's election as Governor
of New York that year brought a new leader to center stage.
The New Deal and World War II: 1933–1945
Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, the longest-serving President of the United States
(1933-1945)
The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great
Depression set the stage for a more progressive government and Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide
victory in the election of 1932,
campaigning on a platform of "Relief, Recovery, and Reform"; that is,
relief of unemployment and rural distress, recovery of the economy back to
normal, and long-term structural reforms to prevent a repetition of the Depression.
This came to be termed "The New Deal"
after a phrase in Roosevelt's acceptance speech. The Democrats also swept to large majorities
in both houses of Congress, and among state governors. Roosevelt altered the nature of the party,
away from laissez-faire capitalism, and towards an ideology of economic
regulation and insurance against hardship. Two old words took on new meanings:
"Liberal" now meant a supporter of the New Deal; "conservative"
meant an opponent. Conservative
Democrats were outraged; led by Al Smith, they formed the American Liberty League in 1934 and
counterattacked. They failed, and either
retired from politics or joined the Republican Party. A few of them, such as Dean
Acheson, found their way back to the Democratic Party.
The 1933
programs, called "the First New Deal" by historians, represented a
broad consensus; Roosevelt tried to reach out to business and labor, farmers
and consumers, cities and countryside. By 1934, however, he was moving toward a
more confrontational policy. After
making gains in state governorships and in Congress, in 1934 Roosevelt embarked
on an ambitious legislative program that came to be called "The Second New
Deal." It was characterized by
building up labor unions, nationalizing welfare by the WPA, setting up Social Security, imposing more
regulations on business (especially transportation and communications), and
raising taxes on business profits. Roosevelt's
New Deal
programs focused on job creation through public
works projects as well as on social welfare programs such as Social Security. It also included sweeping reforms to the
banking system, work regulation, transportation, communications, and stock
markets, as well as attempts to regulate prices. His policies soon paid off by
uniting a diverse coalition of Democratic voters called the New Deal Coalition, which included labor unions,
southerners, minorities (most significantly, Catholics and
Jews), and liberals. This united voter base allowed Democrats to be
elected to Congress and the presidency for much of the next 30 years.
After a
triumphant re-election in 1936, he announced plans
to enlarge the Supreme Court, which tended to oppose his New Deal, by five new
members. A firestorm of opposition
erupted, led by his own vice president John
Nance Garner. Roosevelt was defeated
by an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats, who formed a Conservative coalition that managed to block
nearly all liberal legislation (only a minimum wage law got through). Annoyed by the conservative wing of his own
party, Roosevelt made an attempt to rid himself of it; in 1938, he actively
campaigned against five incumbent conservative Democratic senators; all five
senators won re-election.
Under FDR,
the Democratic Party became identified more closely with modern liberalism,
which included the promotion of social
welfare, labor unions, civil
rights, and the regulation of business.
The opponents, who stressed long-term growth and support for
entrepreneurship and low taxes, now started calling themselves
"conservatives."
Truman to Kennedy: 1945–1963
Harry Truman
took over after Roosevelt's death in 1945, and the rifts inside the party that
Roosevelt had papered over began to emerge. Former Vice President Henry
A. Wallace denounced Truman as a war-monger for his anti-Soviet programs,
the Truman Doctrine, Marshall
Plan, and NATO.
By cooperating with internationalist Republicans, Truman succeeded in defeating
isolationists on the right and supporters of softer lines on the Soviet Union
on the left to establish a Cold War program that lasted until the fall of [the Soviet
Union] in 1991. Wallace supporters and other Democrats who were farther left
were pushed out of the party and the CIO in 1946–48 by young anti-Communists
like Hubert Humphrey, Walter
Reuther, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. Hollywood
emerged in the 1940s as an important new base in the party, led by movie-star
politicians such as Ronald Reagan, who strongly supported Roosevelt and
Truman at this time.
On the right
the Republicans blasted Truman’s domestic policies. “Had Enough?” was the
winning slogan as Republicans recaptured Congress in 1946 for the first time
since 1928. Many party leaders were ready to dump Truman, but they lacked an
alternative. Truman counterattacked, pushing J.
Strom Thurmond and his Dixiecrats out, and taking advantage of the splits inside
the Republican Party. He was reelected in a stunning surprise. However all of
Truman’s Fair Deal proposals, such as universal health care were defeated by
the Conservative Coalition in Congress. His
seizure of the steel industry was reversed by the Supreme Court.
In foreign
policy, Europe was safe but troubles mounted in Asia. China fell to the
Communists in 1949. Truman entered the Korean War
without formal Congressional approval—the last time a president would ever do
so. When the war turned to a stalemate and he fired General Douglas
MacArthur in 1951, Republicans blasted his policies in Asia. A series of
petty scandals among friends and buddies of Truman further tarnished his image,
allowing the Republicans in 1952 to crusade against “Korea, Communism and
Corruption.” Truman dropped out of the presidential race early in 1952, leaving
no obvious successor. The convention nominated Adlai
Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, only to see him
overwhelmed by two Eisenhower landslides.
Adlai
Stevenson warns against a return of the Republican policies of Herbert
Hoover, 1952 campaign poster
In Congress
the powerful duo of House Speaker Sam Rayburn
and Senate Majority leader Lyndon
B. Johnson held the party together, often by compromising with Eisenhower. In 1958 the party made dramatic gains in the
midterms and seemed to have a permanent lock on Congress, thanks largely to
organized labor. Indeed, Democrats had majorities in the House every election
from 1930 to 1992 (except 1946 and 1952). Most southern Congressmen were
conservative Democrats, however, and they usually worked with conservative
Republicans. The result was a Conservative Coalition that blocked
practically all liberal domestic legislation from 1937 to the 1970s, except for
a brief spell 1964-65, when Johnson neutralized its power. The counterbalance to the Conservative Coalition was the Democratic Study Group, which led the charge
to liberalize the institutions of Congress and eventually pass a great deal of
the Kennedy-Johnson program.
1960, Kennedy
reluctant to help Dr. King. According to
Kennedy’s Civil Rights advisor, Harris Wofford – Gov Vandiver, Griffin Bell and
other Democratic supporters had told Kennedy that he would loose states if he
interfered or issued a strong statement protesting King’s arrest. Wofford called to get King released, not
Kennedy.
In 1963 The
Democratic Administration approves wiretaps on King. October 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy
gave FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover permission to maintain a wiretap on King’s
home telephone. In December of 1963, the
FBI’s Domestic Intellegence Division held a nine hour session that resulted in
a secret program to discredit King.
1964,
Democrates oppose Civil Rights Act. Two
prime sponsors and supporters of the bill were Republican Sen Everett Dirkson
of Ill, and Democratic Sen Hurbert Humphrey of Minn. This bill was almost identicle to the 1875
Civil Rights Act that the democrats successfully had the United State Supreme
Court reject and declare as “unconstitutional”.
President
John
F. Kennedy with his brothers, Attorney General and later New York
Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Massachusetts
Senator Ted
Kennedy.
The election
of John F. Kennedy in 1960 over then Vice
President Richard Nixon re-energized the party. His youth,
vigor and intelligence caught the popular imagination. New programs like the
Peace Corps harnessed idealism. In terms of legislation, Kennedy was stalemated
by the Conservative Coalition. Though Kennedy's
term in office lasted only about a thousand days, he tried to hold back
Communist gains after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the construction
of the Berlin
Wall, and sent 16,000 soldiers to Vietnam to advise the hard-pressed South
Vietnamese army. He challenged America in the Space Race
to land an American man on the moon by 1969. After the Cuban Missile Crisis he moved to de-escalate
tensions with the Soviet Union. Kennedy also pushed for civil
rights and racial integration, one example being Kennedy
assigning federal marshals to protect the Freedom
Riders in the south. His election did mark the coming of age of the
Catholic component of the New Deal Coalition. After 1964 middle class Catholics
started voting Republican in the same proportion as their Protestant neighbors.
Except for the Chicago of Richard
J. Daley, the last of the Democratic machines faded away. President Kennedy
was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas,
Texas. Soon after then-Vice President Lyndon
B. Johnson was sworn in as the new president. Johnson, heir to the New Deal
broke the Conservative Coalition in Congress and
passed a remarkable number of liberal laws, known as the Great
Society. Johnson succeeded in passing major civil
rights laws that started the racial integration in the south. At the same
time, Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, leading to an inner conflict inside the
Democratic Party that shattered the party in the elections of 1968. Kennedy's
involvement in Vietnam proved momentous, for his successor Lyndon Johnson
decided to stay, and double the investment, and double the bet again and again
until over 500,000 Americans were fighting in that small country.
The Johnson Years: 1963–1968
President
Lyndon Johnson foresaw the end of the Solid South
when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The New Deal
Coalition began to fracture as more Democratic leaders voiced support for civil
rights, upsetting the party's traditional base of conservative Southern Democrats and Catholics in Northern cities. After Harry Truman's
platform gave strong support to civil rights and anti-segregation laws during the 1948 Democratic National Convention,
many Southern Democratic delegates decided to split from the Party and formed
the "Dixiecrats,"
led by South Carolina governor Strom
Thurmond (who, as a Senator, would later join the Republican Party).
However, few other conservative Democrats left the party. On the other hand, African
Americans, who had traditionally given strong support to the Republican
Party since its inception as the "anti-slavery party," continued to
shift to the Democratic Party due to its New Deal economic opportunities and
support for civil rights—largely due to New Deal relief programs, patronage
offers, and the advocacy of civil rights by First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt. Although Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried half the South in
1952 and 1956, and Senator Barry
Goldwater also carried five Southern states in 1964, Democrat Jimmy
Carter carried all of the South except Virginia, and there was no long-term
realignment until Ronald Reagan's sweeping victories in the South in
1980 and 1984.
The party's
dramatic reversal on civil rights issues culminated when Democratic President Lyndon
B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile, the Republicans, led again by
Nixon, were beginning to implement their Southern
strategy, which aimed to resist federal encroachment on the states, while
appealing to conservative and moderate white Southerners in the rapidly growing
cities and suburbs of the South.
The year 1968
marked a major crisis for the party. In January, even though it was a military
defeat for the Viet Cong, the Tet
Offensive began to turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War.
Senator Eugene McCarthy rallied intellectuals and anti-war
students on college campuses and came within a few percentage points of
defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary; Johnson was
permanently weakened. Four days later Senator Robert
Kennedy, brother of the late president, entered the race. Johnson stunned
the nation on March 31 when he withdrew from the race; four weeks later his
vice-president, Hubert H. Humphrey, entered the race but did not
run in any primary. Kennedy and McCarthy traded primary victories while
Humphrey gathered the support of labor unions and the big-city bosses. Kennedy
won the critical California primary on June 4, but he was assassinated that
night. (Even as Kennedy won California, Humphrey had already amassed 1000 of
the 1312 delegate votes needed for the nomination, while Kennedy had about
700.) During the 1968 Democratic National Convention,
while police and the National Guard violently confronted anti-war protesters on
the streets and parks of Chicago, the Democrats nominated Humphrey. Meanwhile
Alabama's Democratic governor George
C. Wallace launched a third-party campaign and at one point was running
second to the Republican candidate Richard
M. Nixon. Nixon barely won, with the Democrats retaining control of
Congress. The party was now so deeply split that it would not again win a
majority of the popular vote for president until 2008.
The degree to
which the Southern Democrats had abandoned the party became evident in the 1968 presidential election
when the electoral votes of every former Confederate state except Texas went to either
Republican Richard Nixon or independent Wallace. Humphrey's
electoral votes came mainly from the Northern states, marking a dramatic
reversal from the 1948 election 20 years
earlier, when the losing Republican electoral votes were concentrated in the
same states.
Transformation years: 1969-1992
President
Jimmy
Carter was elected in 1976 and defeated in 1980.
Following the
1968 debacle, the McGovern-Fraser Commission proposed, and
the Party adopted, far-reaching changes in how national convention delegates
were selected. More power over the presidential nominee selection accrued to
the rank and file and presidential primaries became significantly more
important. In 1972, the Democrats nominated Sen.
George
McGovern (SD) as the presidential candidate on a platform which advocated,
among other things, immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (with his anti-war
slogan "Come Home, America!") and a guaranteed minimum income for all
Americans. McGovern's forces at the national convention ousted Mayor Richard
J. Daley and the entire Chicago delegation, replacing them with insurgents
led by Jesse Jackson. After it became known that McGovern's
running mate, Thomas Eagleton, had received electric shock
therapy, McGovern said he supported Eagleton "1000%" but he was soon forced
to drop him and find a new running mate. With his campaign stalled for several
weeks McGovern finally selected Sargent
Shriver, a Kennedy in-law who was close to Mayor Daley. On July 14, 1972,
McGovern appointed his campaign manager, Jean Westwood as the first woman chair
of the Democratic National Committee. McGovern was defeated in a landslide by
incumbent Richard Nixon, winning only Massachusetts and
Washington, D.C.
The sordid Watergate
scandal soon destroyed the Nixon presidency, giving the Democrats a flicker of
hope. With Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon soon after his
resignation in 1974, the Democrats used the "corruption" issue to
make major gains in the off-year elections. In 1976, mistrust of the
administration, complicated by a combination of economic recession and
inflation, sometimes called stagflation,
led to Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter, a former Governor of Georgia. Carter won as a little-known outsider
by promising honesty in Washington, a message that played well to voters as he
won narrowly.
Carter
represented the total outsider, who promised honesty in government. He had
served as a naval officer, a farmer, a state senator, and a one-term governor.
His only experience with federal politics was when he chaired the Democratic
National Committee's congressional and gubernatorial elections in 1974. Some of
Carter's major accomplishments consisted of the creation of a national energy
policy and the consolidation of governmental agencies, resulting in two new
cabinet departments, the United States Department of Energy
and the United States Department of
Education. Carter also successfully deregulated the trucking, airline,
rail, finance, communications, and oil industries (thus eliminating the New Deal
approach to regulation of the economy), bolstered the social
security system, and appointed record numbers of women and minorities to
significant government and judicial posts. He also enacted strong legislation
on environmental protection, through the expansion of the National Park Service in Alaska, creating
103 million acres (417,000 km²) of land. In foreign affairs, Carter's accomplishments
consisted of the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the creation of full
diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the
negotiation of the SALT II Treaty. In addition, he championed human rights
throughout the world and used human rights as the center of his
administration's foreign policy.
Even with all
of these successes, Carter failed to implement a national health plan or to
reform the tax system, as he had promised in his campaign. Inflation was also
on the rise. Abroad, the Iranians held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, and
Carter's diplomatic and military rescue attempts failed. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan later that year weakened the perception Americans had of Carter.
Even though he had already been defeated for re-election, Carter fortunately
was able to negotiate the release of every American hostage. They were lifted
out of Iran minutes after Reagan was inaugurated and Carter served as Reagan's
emissary to greet them when they arrived in Germany. In 1980, Carter defeated Edward
Kennedy to gain renomination, but lost to Ronald
Reagan in November. The Democrats lost 12 Senate seats, and for the first
time since 1954, the Republicans controlled the Senate. The House, however,
remained in Democratic hands.
1980s: Battling Reaganism
Rep. Thomas
"Tip" O'Neill was Speaker of the House from 1977-1987. O'Neill
was the highest ranking Democrat in Washington, D.C. during most of Reagan's
term.
Democrats who
supported many conservative policies were instrumental in the election of
Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The "Reagan
Democrats" were Democrats before the Reagan years, and afterward, but
they voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (and for George
H. W. Bush in 1988), producing their landslide victories. Reagan Democrats
were mostly white ethnics in the Northeast and Midwest who were attracted to
Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion, and to his strong
foreign policy. They did not continue to vote Republican in 1992 or 1996, so
the term fell into disuse except as a reference to the 1980s. The term is not
used to describe southern whites who became permanent Republicans in
presidential elections. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster analyzed white
ethnic voters, largely unionized auto workers, in suburban Macomb County,
Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for Kennedy in
1960 and 66 percent for Reagan in 1984. He concluded that Reagan Democrats no
longer saw Democrats as champions of their middle class aspirations, but
instead saw it as being a party working primarily for the benefit of others,
especially African Americans, advocacy
groups of the political left, and the very poor. But after
Reagan's appointment of Donald Dotson as the chairman of the National Labor
Relations Board and his notoriously pro-employer stance, Bill Clinton would
reclaim the Reagan Democrats with considerable success in 1992 and 1996.
The failure
to hold the Reagan Democrats and the white South led to the final collapse of
the New Deal coalition. Reagan carried 49 states
against former Vice President and Minnesota Senator Walter
Mondale, a New Deal stalwart, in 1984. In response to these
landslide defeats, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
was created in 1985. It worked to move the party rightwards to the ideological
center in order to recover some of the fundraising that had been lost to the
Republicans due to corporate donors supporting Reagan. With the party retaining
left-of-center supporters as well as supporters holding moderate or
conservative views on some issues, the Democrats became generally a catch all party
with widespread appeal to most opponents of the Republicans. Despite this,
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, running not as a New Dealer but as
an efficiency expert in public administration, lost by a landslide in 1988 to Vice President George
H. W. Bush.
The South becomes Republican
For nearly a
century after Reconstruction, the white
South identified with the Democratic Party. The Democrats' lock on power was so
strong, the region was called the Solid South,
although the Republicans controlled parts of the Appalachian mountains and they competed for
statewide office in the border states. Before 1948, southern Democrats
believed that their party, with its respect for states'
rights and appreciation of traditional southern values, was the defender of
the southern way of life. Southern Democrats warned against aggressive designs
on the part of Northern liberals and Republicans and civil rights activists
whom they denounced as "outside agitators."
The adoption
of the strong civil rights plank by the 1948 convention and the integration of
the armed forces by President Harry
S. Truman's Executive Order 9981, which provided for equal treatment and
opportunity for African-American servicemen, drove a wedge between the northern
and southern branches of the party.
With the
presidency of John F. Kennedy the Democratic Party began to
embrace the civil rights movement, and its lock on the
South was irretrievably broken. Upon signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon
B. Johnson prophesied, "We have lost the South for a generation."
Modernization
had brought factories, national businesses, and larger, more cosmopolitan
cities such as Atlanta,
Dallas, Charlotte,
and Houston to
the South, as well as millions of migrants from the North and more
opportunities for higher education. Meanwhile, the cotton and tobacco economy
of the traditional rural South faded away, as former farmers commuted to factory
jobs. As the South became more like the rest of the nation, it could not stand
apart in terms of racial segregation.
Integration
and the civil rights movement
caused enormous controversy in the white South, with many attacking it as a
violation of states' rights. When segregation was outlawed by
court order and by the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, a die-hard element
resisted integration, led by Democratic governors Orval
Faubus of Arkansas, Lester Maddox of Georgia, and, especially George
Wallace of Alabama. These populist governors appealed to a less-educated,
blue-collar electorate that on economic grounds favored the Democratic Party,
but opposed desegregation. After 1965 most Southerners accepted integration
(with the exception of public schools). Believing themselves betrayed by the
Democratic Party, traditional white southerners joined the new middle-class and
the Northern transplants in moving toward the Republican Party. Meanwhile,
newly enfranchised Black voters began supporting Democratic candidates at the
80-90-percent levels, producing Democratic leaders such as Julian Bond
and John Lewis of Georgia, and Barbara
Jordan of Texas. Just as Martin Luther King had promised, integration had
brought about a new day in Southern politics. The Republican Party's southern
strategy further alienated black voters from the party.
In addition
to its white middle-class base, Republicans attracted strong majorities among
evangelical Christians, who prior to the 1980s were largely apolitical. Exit
polls in the 2004 presidential election
showed that Bush led Kerry by 70–30% among Southern whites, who comprised 71%
of the voters. Kerry had a 90–9 lead among the 18% of Southern voters who were
black. One third of the Southern voters said they were white evangelicals; they
voted for Bush by 80–20.
The New Democrats: 1992-2004
During
Bill
Clinton's presidency the Democratic Party moved ideologically toward the
center.
In the 1990s
the Democratic Party revived itself, in part by moving to the right on economic
policy. In 1992, for the first time
in 12 years, the United States had a Democrat in the White House. During
President Bill Clinton's term, the Congress balanced the federal
budget for the
first time since the Kennedy presidency and presided over a robust American
economy that saw incomes grow across the board. In 1994, the economy had the
lowest combination of unemployment and inflation in 25 years. President Clinton
also signed into law many liberal causes, including the Brady Bill,
which imposed a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases; he also signed
into legislation a ban on many types of semi-automatic firearms (which expired in
2004). His Family and Medical Leave Act, covering
some 40 million Americans, offered workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid,
job-guaranteed leave for childbirth or a personal or family illness. He helped
temporarily restore democracy to Haiti, took a strong (if ultimately unsuccessful) hand in
Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, brokered an historic cease-fire in Northern
Ireland, and negotiated the Dayton
accords, which helped bring an end to nearly four years of terror and
killing in the former Yugoslavia. In 1996, Clinton became the
first Democratic president to be reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.
However, the
Democrats lost their majority in both houses of Congress in 1994. Clinton
vetoed two Republican-backed welfare
reform bills before signing the third, the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. The tort reform
Private Securities Litigation
Reform Act passed over his veto. Labor unions, which had been steadily
losing membership since the 1960s, found they had also lost political clout
inside the Democratic Party; Clinton enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement
with Canada and Mexico over their
strong objections. In 1998, the
Republican-led House of Representatives impeached Clinton on two charges; he
was subsequently acquitted by the United States Senate in 1999. Under Clinton's
leadership, the United States participated in NATO's Operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia
that year.
When the DLC
attempted to move the Democratic agenda in favor of more centrist
positions, prominent Democrats from both the centrist and conservative factions
(such as Terry McAuliffe) assumed leadership of the party
and its direction. Some liberals and progressives felt alienated by the
Democratic Party, which they felt had become unconcerned with the interests of
the common people and left-wing issues in general. Some Democrats challenged
the validity of such critiques, citing the Democratic role in pushing for
progressive reforms.
Election of 2000
Main
article: United States presidential
election, 2000
During the presidential election of 2000,
the Democrats chose Vice President Al Gore to be
the party's candidate for the presidency. Gore ran against George
W. Bush, the Republican candidate and son of a former President. The issues
Gore championed include debt reduction, tax cuts, foreign policy, public
education, global warming, judicial appointments, and affirmative action. Nevertheless, Gore's
affiliation with Clinton and the DLC caused critics to assert that Bush and
Gore were too similar, especially on free trade, reductions in social welfare,
and the death penalty. Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader
in particular was very vocal in his criticisms. "We want to punish the
Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them," Nader's closest advisor
said.
Gore won a
popular plurality of over 500,000 votes over Bush, but lost in the Electoral College by four votes.
Many Democrats blamed Nader's third-party spoiler
role for Gore's defeat. They pointed to the states of New Hampshire (4
electoral votes) and Florida (25 electoral votes), where Nader's total votes
exceeded Bush's margin of victory. In Florida, Nader received 97,000 votes;
Bush defeated Gore by a mere 538. Controversy plagued the election, and Gore
largely dropped from politics for years; by 2005 however he was making speeches
critical of Bush's foreign policy.
Despite
Gore's close defeat, the Democrats gained five seats in the Senate (including
the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York), to turn
a 55-45 Republican edge into a 50-50 split (with a Republican Vice President
breaking a tie). However, when Republican Senator Jim
Jeffords of Vermont decided in 2001 to become an independent and vote with
the Democratic Caucus, the majority status shifted along with the seat,
including control of the floor (by the Majority Leader) and control of all
committee chairmanships. However, the Republicans regained their Senate
majority with gains in 2002 and 2004, leaving the Democrats with only 44 seats,
the fewest since the 1920s.
2001-2003
In the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the nation's
focus was changed to issues of national
security. All but one Democrat (Representative Barbara Lee)
voted with their Republican counterparts to authorize President Bush's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
House leader Richard Gephardt and Senate leader Thomas
Daschle pushed Democrats to vote for the USA
PATRIOT Act and the invasion of Iraq. The Democrats were split
over entering Iraq in 2003 and increasingly expressed concerns about both the
justification and progress of the War
on Terrorism, as well as the domestic effects, including threats to civil
rights and civil liberties, from the USA
PATRIOT Act. Senator Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against
the act; it received considerably more resistance when it came up for renewal.
Nancy
Pelosi of California became the first woman to lead a major political party
in Congress in 2003. Since 2007, she has been Speaker of the
House of Representatives.
In the wake
of the financial fraud scandal of the Enron
Corporation and other corporations, Congressional Democrats pushed for a
legal overhaul of business accounting with the intention of preventing further
accounting fraud. This led to the bipartisan Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. With job losses and
bankruptcies across regions and industries increasing in 2001 and 2002, the
Democrats generally campaigned on the issue of economic recovery. That did not
work for them in 2002 as the Democrats lost a few seats in the U.S. House of
Representatives. They lost three seats in the Senate (Georgia as Max Cleland
was unseated, Minnesota
as Paul Wellstone died and his succeeding Democratic candidate lost the
election, and Missouri
as Jean
Carnahan was unseated) in the Senate. While Democrats gained governorships
in New
Mexico (where Bill Richardson was elected), Arizona (Janet
Napolitano) and Wyoming (Dave
Freudenthal), other Democrats lost governorships in South
Carolina (Jim Hodges), Alabama (Don
Siegelman) and, for the first time in more than a century, Georgia (Roy Barnes).
The election led to another round of soul searching about the party's narrowing
base. The party's miseries mounted in 2003, when a voter recall unseated their
unpopular governor of California, Gray Davis, and replaced him with a
charismatic Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. By the end of 2003 the
four largest states had Republican governors: California, Texas, New York and
Florida.
Election of 2004
Main
articles: U.S.
presidential election, 2004, John Kerry presidential
campaign, 2004, and Democratic
Party (United States) presidential primaries, 2004
The 2004
campaign started as early as December 2002, when Gore announced he would not
run again in the 2004 election. Howard Dean,
former Governor of Vermont, an opponent of the war and a critic of the
Democratic establishment, was the front-runner leading into the Democratic primaries.
Dean had immense grassroots support, especially from the left wing of the
party. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a more centrist figure with heavy support
from the Democratic Leadership Council, was
nominated because he was seen as more "electable"
than Dean.
In the end,
Kerry lost both the popular vote (by 3 million out of over 120 million votes
cast) and the Electoral College. Republicans
also gained four seats in the Senate (leaving the Democrats with only 44 seats,
their fewest since the 1920s) and three seats in the House of Representatives.
Also, for the first time since 1952, the Democratic leader of the Senate lost
re-election. In the end, there were 3,660 Democratic state legislators across the
nation to the Republicans' 3,557. Democrats gained governorships in Louisiana,
New Hampshire and Montana. However, they lost the governorship of Missouri and
a legislative majority in Georgia—which had long been a Democratic stronghold.
Senate pickups for the Democrats included Ken Salazar
in Colorado and 2004 Democratic National Convention
keynote speaker Barack Obama in Illinois.
There were
many reasons for the defeat. After the election most analysts concluded that
Kerry was a poor campaigner. A group of
Vietnam veterans opposed to Kerry called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
undercut Kerry's use of his military past as a campaign strategy. Kerry was
unable to reconcile his initial support of the Iraq War with
his opposition to the war in 2004, or manage the deep split in the Democratic
Party between those who favored and opposed the war. Republicans ran thousands of television
commercials to argue that Kerry had flip-flopped on Iraq. When Kerry's home
state of Massachusetts legalized same-sex
marriage, the issue split liberal and conservative Democrats and
independents (Kerry publicly stated throughout his campaign that he opposed
same sex marriage, but favored civil unions). Republicans exploited the
same-sex marriage issue by promoting ballot initiatives in 11 states that
brought conservatives to the polls in large numbers; all 11 initiatives passed.
Flaws in vote-counting systems may also
have played a role in Kerry's defeat (see 2004
U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities). Senator Barbara
Boxer of California and several Democratic U.S. Representatives (including John
Conyers of Michigan) raised the issue of voting irregularities in Ohio when
the 109th Congress first convened, but they were defeated 267-31 by the House
and 74-1 by the Senate. Other factors include a healthy job market, a rising
stock market, strong home sales, and low unemployment.
After the
2004 election, prominent Democrats began to rethink the party's direction, and
a variety of strategies for moving forward were voiced. Some Democrats proposed
moving towards the right to regain seats in the House and Senate and possibly
win the presidency in the election of 2008; others
demanded that the party move more to the left and become a stronger opposition
party. One topic of discussion was the party's policies surrounding reproductive rights. Rethinking the party's
position on gun control became a matter of discussion, brought up by Howard Dean,
Bill
Richardson, Brian Schweitzer and other Democrats who had won
governorships in states where Second Amendment
rights were important to many voters. In What's the Matter with Kansas?,
commentator Thomas Frank wrote the Democrats needed to return to
campaigning on economic populism.
2005-2007
These debates
were reflected in the 2005 campaign for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which Howard Dean
won over the objections of many party insiders. Dean sought to move the Democratic
strategy away from the establishment, and bolster support for the party's state
organizations, even in red states.
When the 109th
Congress convened, Harry Reid, the new Senate Minority Leader, tried to convince
the Democratic Senators to vote more as a bloc on important issues; he forced
the Republicans to abandon their push for privatization of Social Security. In
2005, the Democrats retained their governorships in Virginia and New Jersey,
electing Tim
Kaine and Jon Corzine, respectively. However, the party lost the
mayoral race in New York City, a Democratic stronghold, for the
fourth straight time.
As a result
of the 2006 midterm elections, the
Democratic Party became the majority party in the House of Representatives and
its caucus in the United States Senate constituted a majority when the 110th
Congress convened in 2007. The Democrats had spent twelve successive years
as the minority party in the House before the 2006 mid-term elections. The
Democrats also went from controlling a minority of governorships to a majority.
The number of seats held by party members likewise increased in various state
legislatures, giving the Democrats control of a plurality of them nationwide.
No Democratic incumbent was defeated, and no Democratic-held open seat was
lost, in either the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, or with regards to any
governorship.
The
Democratic Party's electoral success has been attributed by some to running
conservative-leaning Democrats against at-risk Republican incumbents, while
others claim that running more populists and progressive candidates has been
the source of success. The twelve years the Democrats spent as a minority party
in Congress were characterized by the dominance of the centrist wing of the
party and the 2006 victory only came in the wake of the liberal wing
reasserting itself (most obviously in Howard Dean's election as DNC chair, the
first chair since 1994 not to be a member of the DLC). Exit polling suggested
that corruption was a key issue for many voters.
In the 2006
Democratic caucus leadership elections, Democrats chose Representative Steny Hoyer
of Maryland for House Majority Leader and nominated
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California for speaker.
Senate Democrats chose Harry Reid of Nevada for United States Senate Majority
Leader. Pelosi was elected as the first female House speaker at the
commencement of the 110th Congress. The House soon passed
the measures that comprised the Democrats' 100-Hour
Plan.
The Obama era: 2009-present
On
November 4th, 2008, Illinois Senator Barack Hussein
Obama was elected as the first White/African-American President of the United States by a
margin of 7.2%.
On January
20, 2009, Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. In a
ceremony that spanned days, celebrations included musical performances by Stevie
Wonder and U2 as
well as the traditional parade through the streets surrounding the White House.
The ceremony was viewed by a crowd of around 2 million people, huddled in the
cold winter air waiting to catch a glimpse of the new President. This was the
largest congregation of spectators to ever be present for the inauguration of a
new president
Rev Wayne Perryman
<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=releva
ncerank&search-alias=books&field-author=
Whites, Blacks and Racist Democrats is a modified version of the author's
previous book: The Drama of Obama Regarding Racism. After reading the Drama of Obama, Benjamin
Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the National NAACP said, "Your captions
of political influence on racial
issues are thought-provoking and insightful."