Backstory: Beware of attacks and mandates

By Michael Green

Welcome to the new Fox series "When Presidents Attack." While the series will be new, the concept is as old as it gets.

The Republican National Committee attacked Sen. Harry Reid, the new minority leader, after he attacked President Bush's lies about the nonexistent Social Security crisis. As the previous sentence suggests, Reid is justified.

But so is the Republican Party. This is politics. Reid is a Democrat, and Republicans control the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, many statehouses and the major media. Still, they understandably would like Reid to imitate so many other Democrats in the past four years and be a lapdog.

The bigger problems involve truth and a sense of history. The truth is, Republicans lied about Reid's record (that's also part of politics). And when Bush told Reid he had nothing to do with the attack, he lied or proved he's nothing but a puppet of those who really run his party. As for the history, the oddity is that Bush and Reid have interesting links to two figures who offer insight into their relationship.

Bush and his supporters have--ridiculously--tried to invoke Franklin Roosevelt, who oversaw Social Security's creation, on their behalf. Bush just won the presidency and claimed a vast mandate with the lowest margin of re-election for any president ever.

In 1936, FDR won re-election. He buried Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas. The electoral margin was 523-8, and the popular majority was substantial. FDR promptly decided to go after the Supreme Court, whose majority opposed his New Deal programs. Like Bush, he had yet to appoint a justice. FDR and his aides proposed naming a new justice for each one over age 70--meaning six new justices.

FDR tried to depict the old justices as opposing new ideas. But his biggest judicial supporter, Justice Louis Brandeis, was the oldest justice--the age argument made no sense. FDR also claimed the court couldn't keep up with its workload, which was untrue. Why, FDR was claiming a crisis existed when it really didn't. Bush would never do that.

FDR tried to make his court-packing plan, as it was known, a party issue: If you were a loyal Democrat, you would vote as he wanted. Many Democrats who didn't necessarily like his proposal went along out of loyalty or fear.

A few wouldn't go along. One was a freshman Democratic senator from Nevada, Pat McCarran. In 1932, McCarran defeated Republican incumbent Tasker Oddie, and he clearly benefited from running on the same ticket as Roosevelt. McCarran knew freshman senators usually were seen and not heard. He also knew, coming from a small state and lacking seniority, that staying quiet would make him stand out as much as a belch at a hot dog stand. So, he took on FDR and Nevada's senior senator, Key Pittman, a longtime party rival.

McCarran had been no more than a burr under Roosevelt's saddle. Then McCarran came out against the court-packing plan--loud and clear. He knew FDR was popular and wanted to avoid taking him on personally: He was careful to say the president really wasn't to blame for the proposal, but was simply getting bad advice. Yeah, sure.

After McCarran made his position known, the administration struck back. Postmaster General James Farley--as close as FDR had to a political manager--suggested McCarran could kiss all future patronage goodbye.

McCarran replied in a Senate speech, blasting Farley. He hammed it up, calling the court-packing plan's opponents "a battalion of death" and noting that his doctors advised against him making the speech (that was true: McCarran was 60, short and fat and had health problems; if he didn't invent cholesterol, he was present at the creation).

The Senate voted down the court-packing plan. FDR remained popular, but never as he had been before winning re-election. And he tried to get even: In 1938, McCarran sought his second term, and FDR and his administration supported his opponent, Reno attorney Albert Hilliard, in the primary. Indeed, when FDR's train came through Nevada, he tried to avoid McCarran and praised Hilliard. McCarran forced his way to the train where FDR was campaigning, and the crowd reacted favorably.

Roosevelt and his advisers failed. McCarran benefited from anti-FDR Republicans switching parties to vote for him in the primary. Nevadans resented an outsider, even a popular one, telling them who to vote for.

What lessons can Bush and Reid learn? FDR actually had a mandate and blew it on a dumb proposal; Bush has no mandate and could blow it even worse. FDR attacked a senator and it backfired on him; Bush may have discovered in gratuitously attacking Reid that Democrats finally have figured out the way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him rather than roll over and play dead.

Thanks to seniority and committee chairmanships and how he used them, McCarran went on to become the most powerful Nevadan ever in Washington--unless that distinction now belongs to Reid--and forced FDR and Harry Truman, who hated him, to do his bidding. Bush might want to bear that in mind the next time he claims to be a uniter rather than a divider and not to know what the party he leads is doing. People might even realize he's a liar, and that one of the first politicians with the guts to say so was Harry Reid.