Before Sarah Palin, before Dan Quayle, before groupthink at NASA and thalidomide were these two ideas.
Long, and with great fervor and fun, have we panned John McCain's political dart, thrown with the lights out, more than a few beers in the ol' bloodstream, hands taped together and eyes attuned to three faint letters on the wall: "POW."
That Sarah Palin was, is and shall be a mistake is known by all thinking people living in reality.
Today's decisions make selecting her look positively ... well, almost sane.
On September 4, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubas, continuing his staring contest with Washington, called in the state's National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock Central High School.
That day, Ford introduced the Edsel.
Geniuses all around, eh?
For, of all people, Thomas Eagleton, born today in 1929 and relegated to the annals of "Hmm, what other really bad political decisions compare?"
And for Albert Schweitzer, a man of arts and sciences, who died 43 years ago today.
Tell the truth: You clicked on this diary because you thought I was going to reveal something about Sarah Palin from way back in the day.
Well, now that you're here, you might as well sit back and read. I've snared you in my history-based trap, and now you have to read about segregation and the not-so-new.
Tensions were running high between the races in September 1957. Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were scheduled to open on September 4th with four African American students attending previously all-white classrooms for the first time. In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court had ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that "separate but equal" schools were inherently unequal, thereby setting aside the legal precedents established in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson . The Court "handed the South the greatest problem of readjustment the region has had to face since the Civil War," declared the editors of Charlotte Observer . On December 1, 1955, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black activists launched the now famous boycott of the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama. On September 2, 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubas surrounded Central High School in Little Rock with National Guardsmen and declared the campus off limits to white and to black students. Faubas stated in a televised speech that night that if African American students attempted to enter Central High, "blood would run in the streets."
-Civil Rights Revolution in Mecklenburg County
As I noted a few months ago, that SCOTUS decreed something did not mean it was actually happening. As would happen with the Freedom Riders, there was a gap between the law and the land, and Orval Faubas was pretty thoroughly determined that the land was going to win.
Unfortunately, he was going up against a man who chewed up and spat out Orval Faubases as light, midday snacks.
But Faubas was, as so many of us know far too well (in some cases, personally and painfully), far from alone:
Even more provocative and outlandish were comments made by a racist rabble-rouser named John Kasper . Having already enflamed racial passions among whites in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, Kasper came to Charlotte on September 1st and signed up members for what he called the White Citizens Council . He delivered an inflammatory speech to about 300 white people who had gathered on the steps of the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. He called upon the white citizens of Charlotte to rise up against the school board. "We want a heart attack, we want nervous breakdowns, we want suicides, we want flight from persecution," Kasper declared.
(I should note, for the record, that it is my considered amateur legal opinion that saying "We want to harass these people so bad that they kill themselves" probably violates Brandenberg v. Ohio (which wouldn't come along for another 12 years), but I'm not sure it qualifies as torture under the Bush administration's "It's not torture because we say so" definition.)
The reason for all of this heated action was as follows:
Three years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which officially ended public-school segregation, a federal court ordered Little Rock to comply. On September 4, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied the court, calling in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students--"The Little Rock Nine"--from entering the building.
What happened next?
This.
The author of that video is now in 11th grade. When she made it, she was in ninth.
That video is exactly what Arkansas' best and brightest bigots feared:
ACCEPTANCE.
Because if you allow black and white students to mix, what next?
A lot of things. For one, people begin to think maybe racial separation is kind of pointless. The younger you get someone thinking something, good or bad, the more ingrained it is.
Your power, your superiority, dies. No longer can you make a bad day good by calling someone something foul and smiling because you know if you assault her, you'll get off (maybe even literally), but if she does anything, you can just make it up and a jury will believe it, because "you never know with those people."
You get teenagers, with hormones raging, who find someone they just can't live without. They get all manner of fool ideas in their minds. And you get them holding hands, and kissing, and dancing, and wanting to settle down together and ... well. Whatever those people do, and that text is extra black for a reason.
(You also get Mildred Loving, but that is another story for another day.)
And politically, you get people who ... don't vote anti-black. They don't care. They want their kids to grow up in safety, without fear, and get good educations from teachers and schools, not white teachers and all-white schools.
Well, that's what happens if your racism doesn't evolve, as we've seen with the RNC of late. They're terrified of being outed as (still) anti-black, so instead of saying what they actually mean ("Vote for the white guy!") they dance around the issue.
But enough about those old dying idiots. They're losing, and they know it, and a generation of children is growing up seeing every black stereotype crushed with a laugh and a smile, and sometimes a few inspirational words, by a married black man with two daughters. The Republican white-pride power structure must hate it.
Ah, the Edsel. What killed it?
Hype:
Launched September 4, 1957 after years of hype and hoopla, the Edsel enjoyed a short-lived success, generating more showroom traffic on introduction day ("E" Day) than any other vehicle in history. Huge lines formed at spanking new Edsel dealerships across North America as the soaped-up windows were wiped clean to unveil "The Newest Thing On Wheels!"
Ford authorized a massive, star-studded network television spectacular to give their new Edsel maximum exposure. Bing Crosby was hired to host a LIVE jazz music extravaganza on CBS Television shortly after the Edsel's introduction. Crosby convinced pals Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and Louis Armstrong to join him, with a "surprise" visit by Bob Hope. These well known and loved entertainers were at the peak of their careers at the time, and their presence virtually assured a massive audience. Indeed, "The Edsel Show" telecast was one of the highest rated and well regarded programs of the year.
But in spite of the popularity of "The Edsel Show" and the unprecedented publicity preceding the launch, the Edsel quickly lost favor as the new model failed to live up to the hype. The styling, while unique and interesting, was not widely accepted by the masses, and the car quickly became the butt of jokes. The top comedians of the day seized every opportunity to throw barbs at the Edsel's unique front grille. Roy Brown, Ford's head stylist in charge of the Edsel program, had designed a grille harkening back to the glory days of luxury cars of the 1930's to create a car "that could be instantly recognized from a block away." But the "horsecollar" shape was derided frequently on national television by comedian Bob Hope and others, relating the style to an "Olds sucking a lemon" and even worse as a very discreet part of the female anatomy!
(Learn something new every day. I did not know the Edsel reminded anyone of a vagina.)
The Edsel was supposed to be "The Newest Thing On Wheels." But it was just another Ford:
But the moment [crowds] saw the lineup, excitement died. As such, the great disaster was the fact that no one was purchasing. And that marked the beginning of the end for the Ford division.
[...]
Ford's defunct division had some notable features. But the features weren't enough to lure shoppers into purchasing. "The look of the car was definitely unique, with a huge grill shaped like the letter 'O.' And the automatic transmission was controlled by buttons located in the centre of the steering wheel. It was just kooky enough to turn people off rather than to turn them on. Also, people were expecting something completely new, while in reality the Edsels were built on top of an existing Ford chassis. That was not very exciting to people," noted Brain.
And that's part (though by no meals all) of the problem with John McCain's VP selection: Here we thought, or at least were willing to believe, McCain would return to the John McCain of old, the man who thought for himself (stop laughing) and didn't pander.
This was going to be a change from the pandering of old. He was going to run on his own merits, without the Rovian politics of the past and the 50% + 1 plan.
And then he sold himself to what he believed was the highest bidder. This wasn't change; it was another attempt to change his middle name from Sidney to Jesus, just as George W. Bush ran as the guy who was just a good Christian (except when he was lying, manipulating and otherwise doing things no actual Christian could ever admire).
Sarah Palin is the Edsel of modern politics. There is nothing special about her that's good. There's plenty special about her that's bad, but everything that sets her apart from the average voter and is politically important is bad.
Ford hyped this new car something fierce and lost $350 million. But according to the writer of this article, Ford's biggest mistake was not sticking with its novelty features and instead making the Edsel just another Ford:
In 1959, Edsel sales nose-dived. Here's why: First, the distinctive styling was made blander. Second, the car was now offered with an economy six-cylinder engine as an option - hardly the way to bolster the car's performance image. The model line-up was substantially reduced. So were the number of dealers. The innovative push-button transmission controls were gone, replaced with the conventional column lever used in Fords. No wonder the car bombed.
All of these changes were made at the behest of Ford Group Vice-President, Robert McNamara, later U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. McNamara didn't like the Edsel. It looked too flashy, he thought, and it offended his sense of what an automobile should be - a no-nonsense, practical car. McNamara was a big fan of the bland and compact Ford Falcon, introduced about the same time the Edsel died. At the press preview dinner in 1957, before the Edsel had even been introduced to the public, McNamara told an associate, "I've got a plan for phasing it out." One automotive historian wrote that the Edsel would have survived if McNamara hadn't "axed it to bolster his ego."
Too bad for the Mekong Delta that McNamara didn't succeed at Ford.
Does this mean the RNC should take the hint from Faubas and Ford and accept what the future will bring (change, but only the kind of change people think is good)?
Yes. But the party won't. See, when Barack Obama latched onto "Change we can believe in," the party had to find something to counter that. So RNCers can't go with actual change -- they have to go with experienced change. See, that's an old twist on something new. People who want to believe the Republican Party isn't just going to keep screwing them can take that idea of the wisdom to know what to change (one's values, in keeping with what one thinks barely more than half the country wants) and ignore everything else.
And that's the dead end. But the horrible thing for McCain and his party is that they're dead this cycle anyway. Keep Palin in and voters will see McCain as pandering to Christian wedge issues at the expense of things voters actually care about. Switch Palin out for anyone and voters see McCain as abandoning those issues and admitting this election can't be won by distractions. Either move plays directly into our hands and leaves RNC strategists and other sorry figures trying to cover their scalps with less hair than Pat Buchanan and John McCain maneuver as if to pretend they're not bald.
McNamara thought he knew better than Ford's engineers and better than the American people. In the end, he lost both.
Faubas tried to stand up to Eisenhower, and he got his National Guard taken away from him. Faubas (whom some Web sites are suggesting used segregation as a distraction to regain support) stayed standing still while Eisenhower moved him, and 51 years later, the state and the nation are still walking away from racism, though it is by no means anywhere near a speck in the rear-view mirror of the Edsel hybrid of society.
Here's to you, Sarah Palin. Your name and circumstance are going to make you a historical asterisk, and whatever happens now, you can only hope everybody forgets your name and everything about you.