Illusions of Progress by Brent Cebul;

Author:Brent Cebul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781512823820
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2022-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Humphrey-Hawkins and the Crisis of Federalism

Jimmy Carter began seriously exploring a run for the White House in 1972. That year, he became chairman of the Democratic Governors Campaign Committee, his first position in the national party. Carter did not shrink from controversy or confrontation and, ahead of the 1972 Democratic Convention, joined a bloc of southern and Border South governors at West Virginia’s Greenbrier Hotel to discuss derailing George McGovern’s candidacy. Carter was especially outspoken, warning that nominating McGovern would risk “decimating our ranks in the national congress and in state houses.” McGovern’s liberalism was “completely unacceptable to the majority of voters in many of our states.” Carter even drew the ire of Georgia state house representative and civil rights icon Julian Bond, who charged Carter with perpetuating Jim Crow politics. Carter accused Bond of making a “racist statement,” noting that Democrats had lost Georgia in 1964 and 1968 because they failed to seek Georgians’ support.44 He did not specify which Georgians he meant.

At the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach, Carter claimed the party’s right flank, continuing to undermine McGovern while simultaneously lobbying to be McGovern’s vice presidential nominee. Speaking before the delegates, Carter argued for the role of the states, rather than the national government, in innovating policy within the federal system. He cited the Appalachian Regional Commission as a signal example of states taking their own initiative—albeit with “substantial” “federal investments.” He also touted Georgia’s APDCs, in which “the Federal government played a supporting role, not the primary role.”45 Even as Carter championed those aspects of liberalism’s supply side that could be read as conservative—the same aspects Barry Goldwater saluted in Rome in 1961—he took his place in the long history of southern politicians who did so on behalf of states’ rights to greater federal assistance. As president, however, Carter would view the federal government’s “supporting role” in far narrower terms.

On the campaign trail, Carter’s efforts to bind a fraying Democratic coalition suggested just how untenable a proposition that was becoming. Elites, public officials, and growing ranks of white voters were deeply suspicious of minority administration and quota-based regulations while mobilized minority groups called for targeted, compensatory spending after decades of neglect and violence. To straddle the issue, Carter blended his personal conservatism—his born-again Christianity and his roots as a small-town businessman turned outsider politician—with a technocratic SGPB-style approach to policymaking. Carter emphasized an awkward blend of traditional liberal commitments to boosting employment, the era’s customary calls to tame inflation, and a pledge to support struggling state and local governments by restoring “a true system of federalism.”46 His personal career with federal aid, marked in equal parts by criticism and dependence, suggested how thorny these dynamics could be. Moreover, Carter struggled to differentiate his vision of intergovernmental reform from Nixon and Ford’s New Federalism precisely because they largely agreed on maintaining local elites’ administrative authority within decentralized federal programs.

But Carter’s election fundamentally depended upon his ability to court minority voters at a moment of profound and progressive change in the party’s electorate.

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