Bob Herbert today with another example of why McCain--and in far too many cases Obama as well--is talking the talk... but not the walk...
August 19, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
A World of Difference
By BOB HERBERT
Presidential elections always have their share of foolishness, hypocrisy and, let's say, elasticity when it comes to facts.
This is what comes to mind whenever I hear John McCain and other Republicans reverentially invoking the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Senator McCain will tell you outright: "I am a Teddy Roosevelt Republican."
That's about as elastic as the facts can get. In June, Mr. McCain ("We're gonna drill here! We're gonna drill now!") got a big boost in donations from oil industry executives after he reversed course and came out strongly in favor of offshore drilling. A Washington Post headline pointedly said: "Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling."
To put it mildly, that was not very Rooseveltian. Around the same time that the McCain campaign was pocketing its oil industry windfall, the historian Douglas Brinkley was poring over letters in which Roosevelt, running for his first full term as president in 1904, was indignantly ordering his campaign to return a $100,000 contribution from the Standard Oil Company.
In a letter to his campaign manager, dated Oct. 26, 1904, Roosevelt said: "I must ask you to direct that the money be returned to them forthwith." As Roosevelt saw it: "We cannot under any circumstances afford to take a contribution which can be even improperly construed as putting us under an improper obligation."
That kind of thinking is long gone, from both parties. Barack Obama, as well as Senator McCain, has taken contributions from oil industry executives. But what is telling about this particular difference between Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain is that it is so illustrative of what Roosevelt was really about, and how fundamentally different that was from what Senator McCain and the latter-day Republican Party is about.
"The truth of the matter is that Roosevelt today would be on the left," said Mr. Brinkley, who is writing a biography of the former president titled "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt's and the Crusade for America."
Roosevelt believed passionately in regulating industry and curbing the excesses of the great corporations. He favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and fought his party's increasing tendency to cater to the very wealthy. And, of course, he was a ferocious protector of the environment.
Roosevelt was known as the "trust-buster," but it was in the area of environmental conservation that he really made his mark. Mr. Brinkley, in a draft preface to the biography, tells how a number of bird species in the U.S. were headed for extinction as the 20th century approached, in large part because of the popularity of feathered hats for women.
By 1886, when the Audubon Society was founded, more than five million birds a year were being slaughtered to satisfy the millinery trade. The feather boom was especially big in Florida. Egrets, herons — just piles and piles of birds were being destroyed, many of them by men with semiautomatic weapons.
Roosevelt was outraged that what he termed "the despoilers" were threatening to ruin the bird populations along the Florida coasts. Having already championed the preservation of what became Yellowstone National Park, Roosevelt designated Pelican Island, which had a once-thriving bird population off the east central coast of Florida, as the nation's first federal bird reservation.
The move was a tremendous success. Pelican Island became the first unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "By 2003," Mr. Brinkley wrote, "when Pelican Island celebrated its centennial, the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System comprised over 540 wildlife refuges on more than 95 million acres."
We're now in a ridiculous period in which politicians are concerned about appearing too well-spoken and too intellectual — elitist — as if mangling the language while downing a shot and slurping from a mug of beer were sure signs of fitness for high office. So it might come as a surprise to some that Senator McCain's macho hero happened to have been among the first naturalists at Harvard, an inveterate bird-watcher, and a prolific and sensitive writer.
According to Mr. Brinkley: "When writing or lecturing about American birds, Roosevelt often turned downright lyrical, sometimes achieving the level of song."
The kicker to the story about the contribution from Standard Oil is that despite Roosevelt's repeated orders, it may not have been returned. Roosevelt went to his grave believing that it had been, but Mr. Brinkley said a later investigation of the campaign's finances left open the possibility that Roosevelt's orders may not have been followed.
Roosevelt was a complicated fellow. Progressive in much of his politics and intensely concerned about the long-term welfare of the country and its people, he was also a social Darwinian and a conflict-loving imperialist.
What is not in question is that he was a far, far cry from John McCain and today's G.O.P.
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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com
1 comment:
Roosevelt was instrumental in overthrowing the oppressive taxation system that had been so gamed by the wealthy that the largest burden fell upon the poor. When speaking of the brand new tax proposal he said:
I speak diffidently about the income tax because one scheme for an income tax was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; while in addition it is a difficult tax to administer in its practical working, and great care would have to be exercised to see that it was not evaded by the very men whom it was most desirable to have taxed, for if so evaded it would, of course, be worse than no tax at all; as the least desirable of all taxes is the tax which bears heavily upon the honest as compared with the dishonest man.
We as progressives should be leading the charge to do the same today.
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