Republicanisms

Tales of the counterrevolution

By Lance Tapley

The Delights of Democracy: The Triumph of American Politics By Christian P. Potholm, Cooper Square Press, New York. 197 pages. $27.95.

Look at that title: The Delights of Democracy. Could you conceive of a cornier one? Look at that front-cover photograph. It’s as corny as George W. Bush. In fact, the people in it are waving Bush-Cheney signs. To sum up, this is a Republican book. You know what that means: It must be as dull as George W.

But it isn’t dull. And, even if you’re a Democrat or Green, even if you have only a moderate interest in Maine politics — that is the book’s subject — it is worthwhile reading. Actually, the state’s Democrats and Greens should be first into the bookstore. Here is an opportunity to understand how the enemy thinks.

For Chris Potholm is the chief enemy thinker. Long-time Bowdoin government professor, pollster, and oft-quoted political consultant, he is the brains behind what he calls the Republican counterrevolution to the 1950s-1960s Democratic revolution led by Edmund Muskie. The counterrevolution’s Bastille was the successful 1972 race for congress by Potholm’s Bowdoin fraternity brother Bill Cohen, a campaign he managed. More recently, Potholm helped Angus King become governor.

Wait, Angus isn’t Republican, he’s an Independent. Well, in my book, Angus qualifies as Republican. And in Potholm’s book you will see how Bill Clinton, whom Potholm admires, also can be classified as Republican. You will see that Republicans, especially in moderate Maine, are more complex than perhaps you believed.

First, though, why isn’t this book dull? For political aficionados, it is full of useful realism about campaigns, particularly about framing a message and using polling. Potholm shows how a bad campaign can ruin the most attractive cause or candidate. Too bad Jonathan Carter didn’t read it.

Also, Potholm is a raconteur. In the midst of his policyspeak and his irritating misspellings — the book obviously had no proofreader — he humorously recounts hunting rats with a .22 from a moving car on Portland’s Baxter Boulevard. He tells why George W.’s smirk is sexy. My favorite chapter is his review of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous True at First Light. It is one of the funniest book reviews I have read.

There is no reason for a Hemingway book review to be in a volume on Maine politics, but the reader shouldn’t be distracted by such a trifle as coherence. The book is a miscellany of articles and columns, most written for the Lewiston Sun Journal.

There is coherence, though, to the warmth and the spirit of fun that saturate Delights. These elements suggest why Potholm is popular with the press. He also is popular because, unlike many political operatives, he doesn’t try to spin reporters too strongly.

Potholm’s warmth suggests, too, why being a Republican in Maine is a complex and even a human thing. After his defense of initiated referenda, gay rights, and land preservation, it’s hard to accept left-wing assertions that Republicans are war-mongers who eat poor people’s babies for breakfast. In Maine, they tend to be socially and environmentally liberal. In Maine, they are not that far from Democrats on many economic issues. I did not see an abyss separating Chellie Pingree and Susan Collins or John Baldacci and Peter Cianchette.

That said, Potholm nicely reveals the conservative focal point of the Republican worldview — and, I would argue, the contemporary Democratic Party worldview. It has two elements.

First is economic conservatism: protecting corporations and those who profit most from them. “Republicans are best at trying to keep all the money they make and not caring much about other people,” Potholm candidly admits. And let’s note that many congressional Democrats also voted for Bush’s big tax cut for the rich.

Democrats generally show more concern for other people, but Potholm has a point when he claims they “are basically best at spending other people’s money and creating bureaucracies to be staffed by their sons and daughters in order to try to solve insoluble problems and look busy while failing.”

Second, Potholm shamelessly celebrates American hegemony in the world — and dares to call it by that name. Who would do a better job at “keeping the global peace and the economic system it underpins” [my italics], he asks? You really have to admire his honesty, but he seems insensitive to the horrors the United States has inflicted abroad — the millions killed in Vietnam, the hundreds of thousands in Latin America — in protecting and cruelly pushing its economic “system.” While the Republicans lead, the Democrats follow.

At college, a conservative government professor taught me that the conservative is essentially a pessimist, while the liberal optimistically believes human nature, or at least the human condition, can be improved. At a campaign rally in Augusta this fall, Bill Clinton confessed that he learned this only when he was president. With their cold outlook, Clinton said, conservatives are primarily interested in the exercise of power.

How, then, do we reconcile that coldness with Potholm’s warm spirit and his book’s optimistic claim that the American political system is delightfully open to talent from all comers?

History testifies to the success of conservatives in maintaining the status quo. Thus, if you stand among the winners in the exercise of power, as Potholm does, you’re quite likely to be cheerful. I enjoyed his chapter about dining with Secretary of Defense Cohen on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Kennedy in New York Harbor on the Fourth of July as the Statue of Liberty glowed in the sunset.

And, sure, the system is open to talent — especially, if you’re willing to use it to protect the powers that be. Talented, idealistic, ambitious young politicians, take note. For the talented, standing with the winners or the losers is the big choice in life.

The conservative devotion to the exercise of power in maintaining the status quo doesn’t come fundamentally from a philosophical position on human nature. The philosophy is an excuse. It’s a practical position.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com.