As George Lakoff analyzes the Dem mess, we wonder if there'd be a place in either party today for "Mac" Mathias

In 1989, Anson Hines (right) of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) showed retired Maryland Sen. Charles McC. Mathias (1922-2010) a research resource for Chesapeake blue crabs, part of the newly opened SERC laboratory named for the senator, an early environmental champion.

"No problem confronting our nation today is greater than that of our steadily eroding confidence in our political system. This erosion of confidence results from undeniable evidence that our current political campaign process -- relying on big money and secrecy -- corrupts our principles, our leaders, and ourselves."

-- Sen. Charles McC. Mathias (R-MD), in 1971

"I'd like to think there would be a place for Abraham Lincoln, a place for Theodore Roosevelt, a place for Dwight D. Eisenhower. If there's a place for them, I'd like to think I could find a small niche."

-- "Mac" Mathias, retired from the Senate since 1987,
on the future of the Republican Party,
in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun

"The conservatives are winning the framing wars again -- by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively."

-- George Lakoff, in a Dog Canyon post,

"Where's the Movement?"

by Ken

Apparently I missed the announcement -- was it in one of those famous Friday news dumps? -- about President Obama following Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith in defecting from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party to the Democratic wing of the Republican Party. On top of everything else that has befallen the Republic in the last week or two, this is too much for me. Howie promises some thoughts in our 6pm PT post, and then in tomorrow's State of the Union post mortems we can all have a good cry.

I want to get to an extremely important new piece offered to us by George Lakoff, but right now I'm stuck on the news of the passing of former Maryland Sen. Charles McC. "Mac" Mathias, described by Matt Schudel in his WaPo obit as "one of the last unabashed Senate liberals in the GOP," a man who left a sizable legacy of what it means to have the courage of your convictions. Adam Clymer, In the opening graf of his NYT obit, Adam Clymer recalls then-Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield calling Mathias "the conscience of the Senate."

For anyone whose memory of "Mac" Mathias is sketchy, here's a chunk of Schudel's obit:

During his four terms in the House, he helped sponsor civil rights legislation, called for a halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and mapped out a political direction built, in his words, on principle rather than political expediency.

When he ran for the Senate in 1968, he took bold stances that were often at odds with the prevailing views of his party. He opposed the Vietnam War and supported an array of progressive ideals, including racial reconciliation, campaign finance reform and D.C. home rule. He defeated the Democratic incumbent, Daniel B. Brewster, and for many years remained one of Maryland's most popular political figures, even though Republicans were vastly outnumbered in the state.

Sen. Mathias publicly supported the presidential candidacy of Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and 1972, but he was also one of Nixon's most nettlesome opponents from either party. During Sen. Mathias's first term, he voted against a missile system proposed by the administration, advocated a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and marched with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. He supported his Republican colleagues only 31 percent of the time during his first term and compiled a voting record more liberal than those of most Democrats.

He was praised on the Senate floor by a nominal political opponent, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), as "the conscience of the Senate."

In 1969, Sen. Mathias criticized what he called the Republican Party's "Southern strategy" of racial divisiveness and further angered the White House by speaking out against the nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. to the Supreme Court.

"The only conclusion to which I can bring myself," Sen. Mathias said, "is that his confirmation would lower all judicial standards at a time when the public is anxious to see them raised."

After the Senate rejected Haynsworth's nomination, Sen. Mathias helped lead the opposition to Nixon's next nominee, G. Harrold Carswell, who was also denied a seat on the high court.

On Feb. 25, 1970, after a year in the Senate, Sen. Mathias delivered a dramatic and influential speech denouncing U.S. military incursions into Laos, charging that the Nixon administration was risking a "repetition of the mistakes of our Vietnamese involvement."

The blistering criticism from a Republican put the White House and the Pentagon on the defensive, and it bolstered Senate disapproval of the Vietnam War. Congress adopted a resolution proposed by Sen. Mathias to restrict a president's authority to send troops overseas without congressional permission.

In 1972, soon after the Watergate burglary was exposed and two years before an embattled President Nixon resigned, Sen. Mathias was among the first Republicans to condemn the scandal and call for an investigation. At first, he thought Nixon was not involved in the burglary and campaigned for his reelection in 1972. But as evidence of White House complicity grew stronger, Sen. Mathias took a firmer stance.

"Watergate is the turning point in our nation's history," he said in 1973. "If we turn our backs to the grievous attacks that have been made on the Constitution and the laws of the land under the vague incantations of one man's view of national security, we will have lost our right to hold the precious gift of freedom won for us almost 200 years ago by men of courage, integrity and intelligence."

Studel reminds us that Mathias "traveled to Selma, Ala., in 1965 to meet Martin Luther King Jr. and helped draft an open-housing law prohibiting racial discrimination," and "was an early environmental advocate." He recalls that "Sen. Mathias came from a venerable tradition in which Republicans were called the party of Lincoln."

"I'm not all that liberal," he said in 1974, describing his political views. "In fact, in some respects, I'm conservative. A while ago, I introduced a bill preserving the guarantees of the Bill of Rights by prohibiting warrantless wiretaps. I suppose they'll say it's another liberal effort, but it's as conservative as you can get. It's conserving the Constitution."

I really do want to get to this remarkable new piece by George Lakoff, "Where's the Movement?," on our Texas pal Glenn W. Smith's outstanding Dog Canyon blog, but I really don't have the heart just now to do more than introduce you to it, in case you haven't already read it. As we approach the State of Our Disunion, this passage pops out:

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Rest assured that Lakoff has something larger in mind than Obama-bashing: "We can no longer sit on our hands and just criticize the President, or give him advice and hope he can do it alone. We have to provide the answer to his question: Where’s the movement?

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.

Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

Lakoff is specific about what it means to have a "movement," and where and why we've fallen short. And he provides an excellent example in the form of a current focus of his, the California Democracy Movement, which has formed to restore majority rule (and governability) to California through a constitutional alteration ("Our proposition is simple -- one sentence, 14 words: All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote") that can be expected to run into ferocious opposition from the state's always ready for a fight Hard Right.

More on Lakoff tomorrow, or do yourself a favor and read the piece for yourself in the meantme.

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