By Michael Miner
Jose Antonio was a charming, chivalrous guy (Garcia Lorca’s friend) who made a splendid martyr, but to a cause doomed to end on history’s trash heap. “Jose Antonio’s point of view was paternalist,” wrote Hugh Thomas in The Spanish Civil War. “The liberal state, he said, has meant ‘economic servitude, because it says to the workers with tragic sarcasm: “You are free to work as you wish: no one can force you to accept such and such a condition of work. But as it is we who are the rich, we offer you the conditions we like; if you do not accept them, you will die of hunger in the middle of liberal liberty.”‘”
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And that was Jack Kemp’s message as I heard it. Democrats are now so wayward and out of touch that their antecedents have become not the liberals of old–whom today’s Republican orators proudly claim–but the fascists of the 30s. Or as Dennis Byrne, stating the case even more elegantly than Kemp, put it after listening to Colin Powell: “Powell’s assumptions are optimistic; the Democrats’ are pessimistic. Powell assumes that free men and women are inclined, even compelled, to seek and find. The Democratic creed assumes that the instincts of free men and women are base and dangerous. Without a honeycomb of government regulators and overseers, Americans forever would be at each others’ throats. Americans, left to themselves, would tear this society apart, because racism and greed are permanent conditions, a secular form of original sin that can be exorcised only by government intervenors.”
“Who am I that stands before you?” he said. “I was born in Russell, Kansas, a small town in the middle of the prairie surrounded by wheat and oil wells.” Later he would insist, famously, “It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family,” but there was no contradiction. Other than his parents, all he remembered of value of Russell was its sky. “Under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he’s wrong.”
I was there with my family the last night of the Democratic convention. The spectacle was overwhelming. Later on the shuttle bus a delegate told my wife that when the thousands of red, white, and blue balloons that had been held in nets at the top of the United Center finally descended, they all fell in too small an area around the stage. Panicked Democrats began flailing away at the balloons, smashing them to escape suffocating. Indeed, the explosions cracked three tiers up. Imagine these balloons as bubbles of oratory, and that was August.
Maybe not. “We’ll be covering the Fifth District race,” Lipinski told me. “Some of the things we learned will show up when we start reporting that race.”
“Frankly,” says Axelrod, “I think I could have saved myself a lot of time and aggravation if I’d just kept my mouth shut–just kept my keyboard shut.”
