The John Reynolds factor

The John Reynolds factor
by David Benjamin

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”
— Rex Tillerson

MADISON, Wis. — When a man widely regarded as the worst Secretary of State in U.S. history begins to make statesmanlike Commencement remarks at one of most conservative universities on the face of the earth, we should all — as civic stewards of American democracy — look up and smile.

Tillerson’s speech at the Virginia Military Institute was a first step toward rehabilitating his image after an abortive sojourn at State, although we would have been more impressed if he had mustered up a smidgeon of that courage while he was still in office. More important, the Tillerson apology should trigger inklings of optimism for America even as Donald Trump continues to shred the norms and institutions of our republic.

As I watched the VMI speech, I had an unsummoned memory flash of a little-known Wisconsin politician named John Reynolds.

Reynolds was the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1964. To suggest that he lacked charisma would be an insult to the word “lack.” Reynolds was every bit as fascinating as an already-postmarked three-cent Liberty stamp. He neither razzled nor did he dazzle. His policy positions were liberal boilerplate, inherited from a storied forebear, Gaylord Nelson (the inventor of Earth Day).

Notwithstanding Reynolds’ glamour deficit, I was at age 15 a precocious political junkie and a deep-dyed fan. I slapped a Reynolds bumper sticker on my mother’s Ford and haunted the halls of Robert M. LaFollette (another of my political heroes) High School with a Reynolds button on my sweatshirt.

Okay, why so lovesick over the dullest candidate since Coolidge? My passion, I think, sprang from a political education that took place in my grandparents’ living room on Pearl Street in Tomah, Wisconsin. Two pillars underpinned the civic faith of Annie and Archie. One was FDR’s New Deal, which in the depths of the Great Depression launched a thousand vast public works and kept Archie on the job at the Milwaukee Road frog shops. The other was the International Brotherhood of Machinists, a bulldog blue-collar union that had sprung from the Socialist movement of the early 20th century. Archie was a charter bulldog.

Common to both the New Deal and the Machinists was the ideal of government as a sustaining good in the life of every citizen. Archie, the working man, epitomized that principle. Annie’s part was to embody the selfless moral aspect of the American way, expressed in Matthew: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

From Archie and Annie, mostly by osmosis, I came to understand that the Democratic Party — author of the New Deal and partner of the Machinists — was in its finer moments (and only north of the Mason-Dixon Line) inclined to marshal the power of government to succor the least among us.

In 1964, John Reynolds ran on the values I had absorbed from Archie and Annie, Matthew, Jesus and FDR. It didn’t matter to me that Reynolds was human tapioca. His heart was in the right place. As governor, he talked with Republicans and sometimes made reluctant concessions — to get things done. I didn’t object. I knew better. I’d grown up reading a primer of practical politics: Archie’s union newspaper. The Machinists taught me that solidarity and compromise are simply two sides of the same buffalo-head nickel.

The pragmatic politics practiced by Reynolds has eroded. We’ve reached a moment — for the first time since the Depression — when our democracy seems paralyzed and under threat. I have friends who live in daily fear of the news.

I lean in the opposite direction, consuming more news than ever before — and hoping. Lately, I see positive signs. Among these was the result of the West Virginia GOP primary. Although it featured three avowed pseudo-Trumps, the Trumpiest was Don Blankenship, a racist scumbag who got off easy — with a year in jail — after murdering 29 men in a mineshaft where he had greedily defied safety rules written by a U.S. government tasked with protecting the least of us. Blankenship burnished his Trumpian bona fides by uttering bigoted remarks about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and fomenting flimsy slanders — of drug trafficking? — against Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

Blankership’s bid was both a travesty against human decency and the offspring of a mutant presidency.

But then, good news! Blankenship lost to both of the faux Trumpoids. Even better news is that Democratic incumbent, Joe Manchin, is for all practical purposes, a Republican.

Despite a heavily pro-Trump voting record, Manchin sticks with the Democrats and protects the right flank of his Senate leader, Chuck Schumer. Were he a Republican, however, Manchin would be dead meat. Were he as far left in the GOP as he is rightward among Democrats, he would have been long ago vilified, crucified, ostracized and cast out by the likes of the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, Heritage Action, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

In today’s virulently tribal politics, the “liberal Republican” is extinct. But the Democratic Party still has its conservatives, like Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp and Jon Tester. Perhaps because they harbored Southern segregationists in their midst for almost a century, Democrats remain comfortable with a shade of ideological heresy. As long as you hold true to comity, unity and the public good, you can be as Republican-lite as Manchin, as anti-abortion as Donnelly, or even as deadly dull as John Reynolds.

The punditocracy lately is doubtful that these bigger-tent Democrats can make significant headway in the midterms, because polls show GOP loyalty to Trump in the whopping range of 80-85 percent. Tribalism rules.

But, wait. In November 2016, Trump’s number among Republicans exceeded 90 percent. At that level of partisan loyalty, he won the Electoral College by a margin of only 77,000 votes in three states, while losing to Hillary Clinton nationally by almost three million in the popular vote.

What if Trump’s Republican support in 2016 had been, say, only 89 percent? If so, that 77,000-vote edge would have vanished. One absent percent would have sent Donald and Melania back to Trump Tower and no one in America today would know much of anything about Paul Manafort, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Stormy Daniels or Robert Mueller.

Flash forward to the midterms. Trump won’t be a ballot draw either for Republicans or for his blind-loyal believers. There’s not one GOP candidate out there who can remotely mimic the raving, lying, tweeting, pussy-grabbing panache of Trump himself. The best Trump imitator of the year, Blankenship, is already gone — hammered by two guys who’ve got less pizzazz than John Reynolds.

If it’s true what the experts say, that Republicans’ messianic faith in Trump has receded from 90 percent to somewhere in the merely mortal mid-80’s, the cock-eyed optimists and political pragmatists among us have reason to peer toward the horizon in search of that misty, water-colored “blue wave.”

Charles M. Blow, in the Times, captured a mixture of realism and idealism that was also implicit in Rex Tillerson’s act of contrition: “Stop hoping that Trump’s supporters will abandon him. They may never… If they have chosen to follow the forsaken down his path of destruction, so be it. Focus instead on increasing the awareness, passion and turnout of the honorable and the ethical.”