As we hear of the progress of the healthcare bill and the innovative rhetoric about a need for a spending cap, I am less reminded of any Roosevelts or Lincoln, and more of Grover Cleveland, the Great Non-Consecutive One, so brilliantly penciled in by Richard Hofstadter:
a taxpayer’s dream, the ideal bourgeois statesman for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price. He was the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age.
Granted, the current occupant is more svelte, but that too is in keeping with ideal bourgeois norms; they’ve just shifted.
8 comments
January 26, 2010 at 10:57 am
Mike
Funny, I just reread the same essay. I always liked the passage just a couple of paragraphs earlier, and have been thinking of it often lately:
Few men would have the blunt solidity to do what Cleveland did–or rather to fail to do what he failed to do. It demanded his far from nimble mind to display all the imbecile impartiality of a philosophy that lumped together both the tariff racketeers and the poor bedeviled farmers as illegitimate petitioners of the government.
January 26, 2010 at 11:37 am
fromlaurelstreet
No link?
January 26, 2010 at 12:43 pm
davenoon
Link. (Though a full-text version seems unavailable on the ‘tubes…)
January 26, 2010 at 1:02 pm
CharleyCarp
He had the balls to get back on the horse. More than can be said of many a 21st century politician.
It’s been quite a while since I read An Honest President, but I remember coming away from it thinking we could have done, and have done, a whole lot worse.
January 26, 2010 at 4:39 pm
kevin
My grandpa said that Grover Cleveland spanked him on two non-consecutive occasions.
January 26, 2010 at 7:20 pm
RobinMarie
“Thems fightin’ words!” says Daniel, approvingly.
January 26, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Oscar
Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?
January 26, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Jason B.
He’s John Edwards, ha ha ha!