Ten years ago, the Republican establishment awoke to the bracing reality that their planned coronation of Mitt Romney would have some bumps on the road. The biggest speed bump had a name -- Rick Santorum. The day before, the Pennsylvania conservative had swamped Romney in all three contests on the primary calendar: caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and Missouri's primary. Game on!
In boxing parlance, Romney never would knock out Santorum, although the well-funded front-runner would prevail in a closer-than-expected decision. As it turned out, the reluctance of cultural conservatives, evangelical Christians, and working-class "Reagan Democrats" to embrace Romney -- as evinced by Santorum's competitiveness in states where he was vastly outspent -- was a harbinger of the difficulty Romney would have turning out those voters in November.
Would Santorum have fared any better as the GOP's 2012 presidential standard-bearer? One can make that case. But U.S. politics today is a zero-sum game, so probably not. In other words, it's likely that Santorum's palatability to social conservatives would have alienated just as many independent voters and GOP moderates. One political observer at the time certainly thought so.
"There's nothing -- there's no gift, no Christmas gift -- that could be given better than Rick Santorum to the Democrats," this commentator said before the critical Michigan primary. Democrats, he added, "are just salivating at that. And, you know, I don't think they believe it's going to happen. But boy, would they like it to happen because that would be an easy election."
As you may have guessed, that political observer was Donald J. Trump.
The political news on the morning of Feb. 8, 2012, wasn't all good for the Democrats. The day before, Bob Kerrey had announced he would not try to recapture his Nebraska Senate seat. Kerrey might not have won it back. Although he had been a popular figure in his home state, with cross-over appeal, Nebraska had become more solidly Republican since he'd left the Senate in 2001, even as he had developed a more liberal national profile. But he was the Democrats' only real hope, which they knew.
Nonetheless, Kerrey's longing for his old perch brought to my to mind Warren G. Harding's nostalgic remembrance of the Senate as "a very pleasant place." It certainly was a better haunt for Harding than the White House. When Harding's presidency is remembered today it is for the Teapot Dome scandal, Harding's fatal heart attack in his second year in office, his undermining of U.S. entry into the League of Nations, a torrid extra-marital love affair we are still learning more about, and a rambling and pompous prose style epitomized by the president's popularizing of a strange new word, "normalcy."
Before his nomination by the Republicans, Harding had declared, "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality…."
This speech, and others like it, prompted William Gibbs McAdoo, a Democrat with presidential ambitions of his own, to scathingly describe Harding's prose as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."
Fair enough. But Warren Harding, a former Ohio newspaper publisher, was a naturally optimistic man who would never have called the press "the enemy of the people." In the opening lines of his inaugural address to a nation weary of war, Harding spoke of a "new hope," a theme that evokes later aspirational presidents from John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. This attitude came naturally to Harding, a man who easily embraced the future. And it was on this date 100 years ago that Harding installed the first radio in the White House.
By June 1922, Harding was the first president to have his voice broadcast by the new medium. This was a mile marker on a long trek that U.S. presidents have taken to increase their ability to communicate with the citizens of our far-flung land.
Abraham Lincoln used the railroads and the telegraph to expand the reach of his voice. William Howard Taft recorded his speeches on phonograph records. Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the nation live over broadcast "fireside chats," a tradition revived by Ronald Reagan half a century later. Reagan and John F. Kennedy both used their natural grace in front of the camera to make their cases. Bill Clinton set up the first White House website; his successor, George W. Bush, complained when aides prevailed on him to curb his emailing habit.
The first president to install a telephone in that place had been Rutherford B. Hayes. It was 1878, and Hayes's first call was to Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone's inventor. The president's salutary words to Graham were, "Please speak more slowly."
That is an understandable reaction to technology -- to slow it down. But the very nature of technology is to speed things up, and as the social media revolution has shown us, this imperative is not always to the users' benefit.
