“MENE,
MENE, TEKEL, AND PHARSIN”
By
now every American with access to a television, a radio, or a
computer has heard the notorious howl with which Howard Dean ended
his concession speech after the Democratic caucuses in Iowa. Dr.
Dean’s weird outburst was immediately labeled a gaffe, comparable
to the classic political gaffes of the past—but such comparisons
are more accurate than their authors generally know. For the American
political gaffe is sudden, lingering—and completely ambiguous
in terms of its consequences.
Just
what is a gaffe? It can be a gesture just as much as a spoken
word. Al Gore’s alleged eye-rolling during his first 2000
debate comes to mind, or George H.W. Bush checking his watch during
his last 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Or it can
be a photo-op gone badly awry; see Michael Dukakis and tank. The
use of outlandish words doesn’t help, as Republican hopeful
George Romney found out in the 1968 campaign, when he casually
remarked that he had been “brainwashed” in Vietnam.
Gaffes
are not always fatal—although most of the ones we remember
are. George W. Bush managed to survive his notorious campaign
stop at Bob Jones University. Richard Nixon came back from what
seemed to be a career-ending press conference in 1962 when, after
losing a race for governor of California he told the media, “You
won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore...”
Jimmy
Carter survived an interview during his 1976 run for the White
House in which he referred to the “ethnic purity”
of white neighborhoods—and another, in Playboy
magazine, in which he admitted “I’ve committed adultery
in my heart many times,” and spoke of a theoretical “guy
[who] screws a whole bunch of women.”
Carter
had the good fortune that year to be running against perhaps the
most gaffe-prone president in American history, Gerald R. Ford.
During their second debate, Ford got tangled up in answering a
question on the recent Helsinki accords and found himself insisting
that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe”
and that “I don’t believe that the Poles consider
themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” According to
Ford’s chief speechwriter, he had meant “the soul
and spirit of the Polish nation,” as opposed to the physical
Poland, dominated then by four Soviet divisions—but the
president only made things worse by stubbornly talking of the
“allegation of domination” before finally acknowledging
the gaffe three days later. The best way to bury a gaffe, it seems,
is to own up to it quickly.
A
gaffe is often in the eye of the beholder. In March of 1972, Edmund
Muskie was clinging to a precarious lead in New Hampshire’s
Democratic primary when he decided to denounce William Loeb, the
fanatical, right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union Leader.
Loeb had infuriated Muskie by running a letter-to-the-editor claiming
that Muskie laughed at derogatory jokes about Canucks, and by
inflating press reports about Jane Muskie’s occasional use
of curse words into a nasty, front-page editorial.
Muskie
responded by pulling a flatbed truck up in front of the Union
Leader’s offices and calling Loeb a “liar”
and a “gutless coward.” Then—something happened.
Muskie’s voice broke. Was it a sob? Were there tears? Was
that wetness on his cheek?
Nobody
was quite sure. Muskie had been speaking bareheaded, after all,
in the middle of a snowstorm.
“I
was just goddamned mad and choked up over my anger,” the
candidate claimed later, but admitted, “It changed people’s
minds about me, of what kind of a guy I was. They were looking
for a strong, steady man, and here I was weak.”
And
here is the crux of the matter. The general consensus is that
a gaffe is a gaffe if it seems to confirm a perceived weakness.
Muskie was known to have a hot temper. Standing in the falling
snow, choking on either tears or bile, he hardly seemed up to
that elusive sobriquet, “presidential.” Similarly,
Gore’s eye-rolling seemed to confirm that he was arrogant
or condescending; Bush’s watch-watching that he was aloof;
Dukakis’s tanking that he was weak on defense and foreign
policy; Ford’s misstatement that he was bumbling, or naïve
in dealing with the Soviets.
Of
course, in the age of the pack media, these perceptions can often
be highly subjective and unfair in the first place. Temper or
no, Muskie compiled an outstanding record as a governor, senator,
and later secretary of state—and, as the Watergate investigations
later revealed, the “Canuck letter” had come from
Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti. Jerry Ford was probably
the best athlete ever to occupy the White House; a series of unfortunate
public falls and mishaps made him a national laughingstock. Gore
never made the most presumptuous claims attributed to him, such
as that he had “invented the internet” or “discovered
Love Canal”—and a recent New York Times article
transformed his snooty eye-rolling into the gaffe of having “sighed
patronizingly several times” during his debate with George
W. Bush.
Sighing
or eye-rolling, which was it? Unfair? Sure—but then, a gaffe
can consist of doing nothing at all. General Wesley Clark was
recently chided for not saying anything when George W. Bush was
accused of desertion in his presence. A similar “gaffe of
omission” has long been said to have ended the presidential
hopes of one of the most popular and controversial politicians
of the 19th century, the “Plumed Knight” of Maine,
James G. Blaine.
Intelligent,
shrewd, talented, and urbane, Blaine was an early leader of the
Republican party, and would serve as Speaker of the House, senator,
and secretary of state during his long career. He was also a polarizing
figure, regarded as morally suspect by many voters, even within
his own party, for his involvement in a series of stock scandals.
After
finally securing the Republican nomination on his third attempt,
in 1884, Blaine found himself running neck-and-neck in a close,
vicious race with Grover Cleveland. Stumping furiously through
New York, a crucial swing state in the race, he arrived hoarse
and nearly spent in New York City on the evening of October 28th.
The following morning, Blaine received a delegation of several
hundred Republican clergymen, come to pledge their fealty. These
included Pastor Samuel D. Burchard of the Murray Hill Presbyterian
Church, who would enter one of the great, alliterative phrases
of all-time into the American political lexicon.
“We
are Republicans,” declared Dr. Burchard, “and don’t
propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party
whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.”
This
was an obvious slur upon the loyalty of Irish-American immigrants
and their sometimes ambivalent support for the Union cause in
the Civil War, and it should have rung political alarm bells for
an old campaigner like James G. Blaine. At the time there were
no fewer than 500,000 Irish-born Americans in New York City alone,
and Blaine was hoping to capture many of their votes, thanks to
the fact that his own mother had been an Irish Catholic.
Yet
Blaine merely thanked the assembled ministers, and passed up any
opportunity to refute this slight—something most chroniclers
of the incident attribute either to his having been distracted
during Burchard’s remarks, or exhausted by a campaign that
saw him give over 400 talks in the course of six weeks.
The
Democrats were listening, though. Apparently grasping the innate
danger of ever assembling several hundred, politically minded
clerics in the same room, they had a stenographer on hand—and
by the next day handbills containing the damning remarks were
already going out around the country, and “Rum, Romanism,
and Rebellion!” had become a Democratic rallying cry.
Blaine
disavowed Burchard’s remarks two days later, but by then
it was too late. The election proved to be one of the closest
in American history, with Cleveland winning by only 23,000 votes,
out of some 10 million cast. In the electoral college, the deciding
state was…New York, which went for Cleveland by a grand
total of 1,149 votes, a race so close that it was days before
the count was finally certified.
Nearly
all historians of the election have attributed the loss in good
part to “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” So did Blaine,
who after the election lamented the fact that “the Lord
sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher.” Clearly,
Burchard’s gaffe had sunk his candidate.
Or
had it? Closer examination of the record casts considerable doubt
upon Blaine’s assertion—and his credibility.
For
one thing, Burchard’s remark was not even original. Eight
years earlier, after the tumultuous 1876 election, the Republican
House minority leader, James Garfield, had lamented “the
combined power of rebellion, Catholicism, and whisky.” In
the post-Civil War, “bloody shirt” era of American
politics, such aspersions—and much, much worse—were
quite common, and they did not prevent Garfield from carrying
New York State and being elected president in 1880.
Nor
was Blaine really justified in blaming poor Dr. Burchard—or,
for that matter, God. For all that he was supposedly distracted
during Burchard’s remarks, Blaine’s answering speech
to his adoring reverends included the following passage:
“You
can no more separate a party from its history than you can separate
a man from his character, and when the great make-up of public
opinion is ready it takes into account the origin, the progress,
the measures, the character of the party and the character of
its public men”—lines that sound very much like a
thinly coded rehash of just what Burchard was saying. Could it
be that Blaine was not guilty so much of silence, as of trying
to be all things to all people?
There
were many other possible factors that went into his defeat. The
Prohibition and Greenback parties, the Greens of their day, took
a combined 3.24 percent of the popular vote nationally, with the
majority of that total probably coming from Republican ranks.
And October 29 was a bad day all around for Blaine. That same
evening he attended a sumptuous banquet at New York’s Delmonico
restaurant, in the company of a host of leading bankers, robber
barons, and noted Wall Street connivers. The festivities were
not widely appreciated in a city still recovering from a recession.
They were savagely satirized in a New York World cartoon
the next day as “Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the
Money Kings”—a reference to the Book of Daniel, complete
with the original handwriting on the wall: “Mene, Mene,
Tekel, and Pharsin,” “God has numbered the days of
your kingdom and brought it to an end…you have been weighed
in the balance and found wanting…”
And
yet, it also remains entirely unclear whether or not anything
Blaine did actually cost him votes in New York City. New York,
then as now, was a Democratic town, one that not even Lincoln
had carried—and Blaine’s performance was the best
by any Republican presidential candidate in the city in the previous
twelve years. Where the last two GOP nominees had lost New York
by roughly 2:1, Blaine lost by less than 3:2. He drew record votes
for a Republican in the poorest and most Irish wards of the city—while
losing Dr. Burchard’s own bailiwick, staunchly Republican
Murray Hill.
What
did it all mean? Tammany Hall sachem “Honest John”
Kelly had a longstanding feud over patronage with Grover Cleveland,
and seems to have pulled the old Tammany trick of damning the
national ticket with faint majorities. At the same time, rebellious
middle- and upper-class Republicans, repulsed by Blaine’s
financial scandals, bolted the party in large numbers. Or, as
Allan Nevins, Cleveland’s leading biographer, put it, “the
central explanation of [his] defeat was simply that Blaine was
morally suspect.”
A
national election, then as now, is so large and is determined
by so many disparate factors that it is nearly impossible to single
one out. Observers in 1972, for instance, attributed Muskie’s
loss in the primaries as much to his vague message, his soporific
speaking style, and Democratic party divisions, as to any tears
in New Hampshire. Jerry Ford had to contend not just with the
Iron Curtain but the wake of Watergate, a stagnant economy—and
the gaffes of his vice-presidential candidate, Bob Dole, who in
a truly bizarre debate of his own laid the casualties from all
American wars in the 20th century at the feet of the Democrats.
And would we still be talking about Al Gore’s rolling eyes
and patronizing sighs if a few chads in Florida had fallen the
other way?
The
lesson to be learned from all this is that we should resist the
alarming tendency of the American media to superimpose a narrative
on every event they cover, from the World Series to the presidential
primaries. To force, that is, their own handwriting upon every
wall.
Dr.
Dean’s histrionics seemed less indicative of pathological
anger than of just how silly any adult can look trying to cheer-up
a group of disappointed children. But the fact remains that before
Dean delivered so much as a yelp, he had already suffered a resounding
defeat at the hands of the people of Iowa, trudging out on a cold
winter’s night to meet their neighbors in schools and churches
and livingrooms. That is the real story here. It is called democracy.
