Matt Yglesias

The South’s Folly

Does he have the votes?

I’ve been listening to David Blight’s lectures for his Yale course on The Civil War and Reconstruction. And I find myself continually compelled to think about the political situation in late 1860 through the ahistorical lens of today’s political controversies. After all, if Barack Obama with a popular majority and 59 Democratic Senators can’t get a climate change bill through the Senate, then what kind of anti-slavery legislative agenda would Abraham Lincoln have been able to drive through congress had the South not seceded? The Republicans were committed to excluding slavery from the territories, but perhaps slave state Senators could have just dealt with this through ceaseless filibustering. It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.

Right?

Department of Analogies

I think Charles Mahtesian’s take in Politico on the political strategems behind picking John McHugh to serve as Army Secretary is pretty shrewd. As with the co-optation of Jon Huntsman, Ray LaHood, and Robert Gates, Obama is acting in a canny way to not just be “bipartisan” but to undermine opposition to the progressive agenda. Mahtesian lays this all out quite well, but then offers this analogy:

All at once, Obama has selected a nominee who burnishes his bipartisan credentials, opened up a seat prime for Democratic pickup and drained the GOP reservoir of one of the few remaining Northeastern moderates.

It’s an event that’s happening with enough frequency to suggest the presence of a design, a plan that not only sketches the outline of a reelection strategy but manages to drive a wedge into the opposition at the same time. Call it a Sherman’s March in reverse — an audacious attempt by Obama to burn down any lines of escape for Republicans from their one refuge of popularity, the deep South.

I like Civil War history a lot, but I don’t really see the comparison here. A better analogy might be to say that FDR enacted a “Sherman’s March in reverse” using New Deal spending and the pre-WWII defense buildup to funnel funds to build up infrastructure in the South and keep oft-skeptical Dixiecrats in his political coalition. At any rate, interesting article.