Salon.com > Sean Wilentz

Why Hillary Clinton should be winning

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000

The continuing contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a frenzy of debates and proclamations about democracy. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has been particularly vociferous in claiming that its candidate stands for a transformative, participatory new politics. It has vaunted Obama's narrow lead in the overall popular vote in the primaries to date, as well as in the count of elected delegates, as the definitive will of the party's rank and file. If, while heeding the party's rules, the Democratic superdelegates overturn those majorities, Obama's supporters claim, they will have displayed a cynical contempt for democracy that would tear the party apart.

Don’t know much about history

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 00:37:00 +0000

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a professional historian and political scientist. And so it was especially noteworthy when she testified under oath last week that the famous president's daily brief on al-Qaida from Aug. 6, 2001, contained "historical information based on old reporting" that did not warn of new attacks against the United States. If anyone in the White House should know the difference between "historical" and non-historical information, and its importance, it ought to be Rice, the former provost of Stanford University.

It turns out that Rice's testimony was misleading and possibly false. The PDB -- subsequently declassified after intense public pressure -- certainly contains then-current information based on continuing investigations. It specifically refers to "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

Rice's mischaracterization seems to have been overlooked or forgiven by the press corps. To a citizen, this is shocking. But to a historian, Rice's conception of "history" and "historical information" is equally so.

The media gets impeachment wrong again

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 21:59:00 +0000

Five years ago, I testified before Congress that history would harshly judge the unconstitutional impeachment drive against President Clinton. My position was fairly mainstream among American historians. By the time I testified, nearly 500 had signed a letter I helped to write with the distinguished scholars Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward, deploring the impeachment on historical and constitutional grounds. Soon thereafter, a group of more than 400 leading legal scholars, including Cass Sunstein and Laurence Tribe, issued a similar statement.

Not surprisingly, Republicans lambasted both the historians' letter and my testimony, as did journalists and pundits playing amateur historians inside the right-wing media echo chamber. A group of 90 writers -- only three of them historians, but with a heavy contingent from the right-wing think tanks plus partisan ideologues from the Reagan and first Bush administrations, such as C. Boyden Gray -- composed a counter-statement attacking the historians. But a wide range of editorial writers and columnists in the so-called "liberal media" also denounced the historians for being "gratuitous" "condescending" and "partisan."

The racist skeletons in Charles Pickering’s closet

Mon, 12 May 2003 21:55:00 +0000

When Senate Democrats voted last March to reject Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Majority Leader Trent Lott called the vote "a slap at Mississippi, my state." In fact, the bitter party-line vote on Pickering revolved around the same issues that would bring down Lott nine months later: Mississippi's shameful history of racism, and the pro-segregation politics practiced by state Republicans like Pickering and Lott in the 1960s.

Pickering has long tried to downplay and even disavow that history, in sworn testimony to the Senate during his first confirmation hearing in 1990, and again in 2002. Since 1964, the year he switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, the Mississippi judge told the Senate last year, he "was involved and [has] been involved in trying to establish better race relations" in his home state. His supporters have gone even further, calling Pickering, in Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell's words, a man with the "resounding virtue" of "moral courage," who "had to deal with white citizens and politicians who resisted integration and civil rights." But Democrats weren't convinced by the way Pickering recast his history, with Sen. Charles Schumer of New York calling his civil rights record "troubling."

How the Confederate flag flap helped the GOP

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 21:26:00 +0000

The Republicans' historic victories in last week's midterm elections owed a great deal to a surge in white voter turnout in the rural South, notably in South Carolina and Georgia, where incumbent Democratic governors, as well as U.S. Senate candidates, went down to crushing and surprising defeats. One factor largely ignored by the media was the way the ongoing controversy over the official display of divisive Confederate emblems also helped to galvanize angry white voters. So while Democrats debate whether their stance on Iraq hurt them last week, Republicans ought to worry about whether their debt to pro-Confederate flag voters might have gained them victory now at the cost of future races.

In 2000, South Carolina's Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges approved the removal of the Confederate battle flag from atop the Statehouse dome and its relocation to a less conspicuous location on the capitol grounds. A year later, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes forcefully won legislation that redesigned the state flag, vastly reducing the battle flag's presence. Those relatively cautious compromises -- neither man banished the flag entirely -- marked the culmination of campaigns led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and various corporate, church and tourism groups, for whom the old symbol had become both offensive and embarrassing. Hodges and Barnes presented the changes as sincere efforts at racial reconciliation, to help, Hodges said, "the descendants of slaves and the descendants of Confederate soldiers join together in the spirit of mutual respect."

The Democratic Party needs Mondale even more than Minnesota does

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 12:46:00 +0000

In his last-minute, make-or-break debate appearance on Monday, Minnesota's Democratic Senate candidate Walter Mondale presented himself as the voice of experience, the wise elder who could see through his opponent Norm Coleman's fashionable bipartisan posturing and call Coleman to account for his actual, conservative positions. Just as he once famously challenged Gary Hart ("Where's the beef?"), Mondale told Coleman, "Let's cut the fluff" -- dismissing his calls for congressional bipartisanship as a Republican cover to stack the courts with right-wing ideologues.

"What you're doing is sticking with the right wing and pretending to change the tone," chided Mondale. Later the tough political veteran reminded reporters that campaigns are not a "tea party," adding, "The fact is we do have these differences. The public needed to know about them, and we had to be direct in order to do it."

Beware of telegenic Republicans who airbrush their subservience to the ascendant right wing; longtime leadership in government service is not a handicap but a huge asset; energetic glibness is no substitute for know-how and unshakable principle: Those were Mondale's underlying debate themes, from start to finish.

Dear Henry:

Thu, 21 Jan 1999 14:07:00 +0000

In October, Salon printed a statement signed by more than 400 prominent historians making the case that the charges against President Clinton did not meet the historical, constitutional standard for impeachment. This week, three historians who organized that group -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Sean Wilentz and C. Vann Woodward -- submitted to Salon the following open letter to House impeachment managers, which Salon is printing in full.

House Impeachment managers have charged that the views of the "prominent historians" cited in the Trial Memorandum of President Clinton "do not stand up to careful scrutiny." The Managers go on to make specific allegations about the statements of Historians in Defense of the Constitution, published on Oct. 30, 1998, casting doubt on the historians' conclusion that the Framers explicitly reserved impeachment "for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power." They claim this conclusion means that the historians "believe that commission of a murder or rape by the president of the United States in his personal capacity," is not subject to the impeachment clause in Article II of the Constitution.