Former Presidential Candidates Gone Nuts

Andrew Sullivan notes with horror that someone as unbalanced in his views as Pat Robertson ran for President a couple of times and did quite well.  If Robertson is still seriously in the loop for Republicans on political issues, that's bad.  But there is a recognizable type in American politics, the person who runs a credible campaign for President and then goes loony and squanders all credibility afterwards.  Here in Minnesota we have produced two of the great specimens, Harold Stassen for the Republicans and Eugene McCarthy for the Democrats -- both of whom ran a series of increasingly bizarre campaigns for office after their initial credible runs for the presidency.

Actually, this is all leading up to my recommending a fascinating book that I read early this summer, Eugene McCarthy and the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (by Dominic Sandbrook, Anchor Books 2004, paperback ed. 2005).  Some readers may already know, but I didn't, that McCarthy started out as a Catholic intellectual, teaching political theory at my own University (then College) of St. Thomas (after dropping out of an abbey and seminary) before going into politics.  The author traces the varying effects of Catholic social thought on McCarthy, his first political incarnation (Catholic-inspired) as an anti-Communist liberal, and then the later permutations into anti-war candidate in 1968 and eventually, from the late 70s on, quack.  The thesis of the book -- that, as suggested by the title, McCarthy's rise and decline are representative of the fortunes of American liberalism in the same period -- is enlightening, especially the idea that McCarthy 1968 marked a decisive shift of Democratic Party energy away from working-class issues and toward the reform emphases of upper-middle-class intellectuals.  But the thesis that McCarthy is representative also sits awkwardly with the book's portrayal of McCarthy as unusually mercurial and anti-social, and concerned less with issues than with personal status and slights.  At any rate, I commend the book to anyone interested in Catholic social thought and its relation to 20th-century American liberalism, the Democratic Party, etc.

Tom B.