Lessons From the Past

---

---

Our political system is an amazing thing.

It really is. Oh, I know we all complain about things that government does or doesn't do, and we get mad at our elected officials from time to time — but nearly without exception our system has permitted us to make peaceful periodic changes in our elected leadership. We take that for granted, but we wouldn't if we lived in many other places in the world.

But our system also has its idiosyncracies.

The pendulum is always swinging, and the out–of–power party always has plenty of reasons to be energized by midterm elections, starting with the clear historical trend that favors the folks who are outside looking in. This time it is the Democrats' turn as the out–of–power party, and everything seems to point to a big year for them. The president's approval numbers remain low, and Democrats continue to hold a lead in the generic congressional ballot.

Along with that, nearly three dozen Republicans in the House have announced their intention to retire, and more seem likely. The terrain certainly looks favorable for Democrats in 2018.

But history has some cautionary tales.

Let's start with the most recent history that Democrats ignore at their peril.

In 2016 polls showed Hillary Clinton with the lead over Donald Trump — and, indeed, Clinton did win the popular vote by a considerable margin.

But the United States has never elected its presidents by popular vote. It has always elected its presidents by electoral vote, and Clinton's popular votes were too heavily concentrated in the coastal states to influence the Electoral College. (In fact, if you took California's vote entirely out of the mix, Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote; Clinton's margin in California was about 3.1 million whereas her margin nationally was 2.86 million.)

The same thing appears to be likely in this year's congressional races. Democrats are concentrated in urban districts, and the Democrats' nominees in those districts are likely to pile up impressive margins. Nancy Pelosi, for example, routinely rolls up incredible margins in her Bay Area district. It's even likely in some places here in Texas, where Clinton carried the metropolitan counties of Dallas, Travis, Bexar and Harris by wide margins.

But all you need to win an election is a single vote. You'd like to do better than that, of course, but some Democrats are likely to roll up huge margins in some districts — when many of those votes would be more beneficial elsewhere.

In Texas, outside of the metro counties and the ones that border Mexico, Republicans still dominated in 2016 — and likely will continue to do so. Some Democrats are salivating at the thought of the open seats that have been held by Republicans, like the South Texas district that has been represented by Republican Lamar Smith for more than 30 years. Smith is retiring, and there have been rumblings of how Democrats think they have an opportunity there, but one of the Democrats seeking the seat once served on Pelosi's staff. That might help win the Democratic primary, but it isn't likely to be a general–election winner in a district that voted for Trump by 10 percentage points.

That brings me to another point. The Democrats, like the Republicans in the first midterm of the Obama years, are engaged in a battle from within. The battle is between the establishment and the extremists. At stake is the direction of the party.

As the battle plays out, the establishment will prevail in some places, and the loose cannons, who are typically the most energized in the midterms, will prevail in others.

Democrats are certain to try to nationalize the campaign, but midterms are not national campaigns. They are held in every state and every House district, but the issues and candidates vary. It is tempting to vote for the loose cannons because they typically oppose everything the in–power party does, but Democrats need to remember how some of those loose cannons worked out for Republicans in the past.

In 2012, Missouri Republican Todd Akin made his widely reported remarks about "legitimate rape" that helped politically endangered Sen. Claire McCaskill win a second term by 16 percentage points. McCaskill is back, still politically vulnerable and running for a third term in a state that voted for Trump by nearly 19 percentage points.

Similarly, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock's remark that "even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Mourdock won the nomination by defeating six–term incumbent Richard Lugar in the primary.

Indiana has only voted for a Democratic presidential nominee once since 1964, but it voted for the Democrat in that Senate race, Joe Donnelly. He, too, is up for re–election — in a state that supported Trump by slightly more than 19 percentage points.

McCaskill and Donnelly were originally expected to lose in 2012, and their victories are big reasons why, when Democrats need to win only two seats from Republicans to have a majority in the Senate, they must defend more than two dozen Senate seats in November.

Democrats have a rare opportunity in 2018, but it is not a slam dunk.

Taking Back the House

---

---

Democrats face a similar situation to the one Republicans faced eight years ago. In 2010 Democrats held the White House and both chambers of Congress. Today Republicans do.

Granted, the Democrats had larger majorities in both the House and Senate — and they had a more popular president, too — in 2010. Yet they still managed to lose their advantage in the House when Republicans gained a net of 64 seats that year. They lost ground in the Senate and eventually lost that majority as well.

Today many political observers are convinced that the tables have turned — which is based on solid historical data. This is a midterm year, and midterm years almost always go against the party in the White House. That has been true whether the incumbent was popular or not.

Indeed, presidential approval ratings play an important role in midterm elections, but the responses have become increasingly polarized over the years. In the 1950s, for example, an average of nearly half of Democrats said they approved of the job Republican Dwight Eisenhower was doing as president. In the 1980s, an average of less than one–third of Democrats approved of the job Republican Ronald Reagan was doing, and in the 1990s, slightly more than one–fourth of Republicans approved of the job Bill Clinton was doing.

Clinton's successors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, failed to average even that much support from the opposing party.

But Bush's Republicans benefited electorally from the terrorist attacks of 2001. They might have been expected to lose ground in the midterm elections of 2002; instead, they gained ground in both chambers, the first time a president's party accomplished that in a midterm election in nearly 70 years.

(It is unwise to ignore the influence that circumstances can have. At the same time, though, it is not wise to expect too much from things like scandals. The Iran–Contra scandal dropped Reagan's approval rating below 50% in January 1987, but he rebounded to higher than 60% by the time he left office two years later.)

I have a theory about that trend. When it is a president's first — and, in many cases, it has been a president's only — midterm, that president is two years removed from winning the presidency, and his supporters are complacent while his foes are energized. When it is a president's second midterm, his supporters are generally demoralized by something, a scandal or whatnot, and the rest of the country, from those who are indifferent to long–time detractors, is just weary.

It takes truly unusual circumstances for any incumbent to overcome that, and so far such circumstances have not materialized in this election. But it has been observed frequently that the 2016 elections rewrote the rules so I wouldn't rule it out.

In 2018 Democrats need fewer than half as many seats as they lost in 2010 to claim a paper–thin majority in the House. That sounds plausible — and it is — but there is something that is worth remembering.

Unlike Senate seats, which are decided every six years, House seats are on the ballot in every election. There have been 22 elections since Watergate, and a single party has gained that many House seats (or more) in four of them. The rest of the time the gains were less than 24.

It's a tall order — but not one that is impossible to fill.

As Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball recently noted, there is already an unusually high number of House incumbents not seeking re–election — twice as many Republicans as Democrats.

In fact, there are enough open seats in Republican–held districts for Democrats to entertain thoughts of capturing the majority in the House by winning most of them — but that would be a foolish strategy. It ignores the fact that not all districts are created equal.

Some districts have long histories of voting for one party or the other. Like mine, for instance. I live in Texas' Fifth District. It has been represented by Republican Jeb Hensarling since 2003. The only time he was held under 60% of the vote was when he was originally elected in 2002 — and he received 58% in that election. He announced a couple of months ago that he would not seek re–election.

Hensarling is not leaving because he anticipates a tough election. He is highly regarded here and would be sure to win another term if he wanted one. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will be a heavy favorite to win the general election — if he/she is even opposed.

If the voters in this district elect a Democrat to succeed Hensarling, it will be a clear indication that a wave election is underway.

Democrats are more likely to gain ground in districts like Arizona's 2nd District, which was represented by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords before she was shot in 2011 and had to retire. One of Giffords' aides was elected to fill her vacancy in 2012. Voters narrowly chose the loser of the 2012 election — Martha McSally — in a rematch in 2014. McSally was re–elected with 57% of the vote in 2016 and now is running for Jeff Flake's Senate seat.

Democrats are favored to win that House seat this November.

Other open districts are just as evenly divided — and could be prone to flip in the next election with no incumbent on the ballot. The power of incumbency, as I have noted here before, is considerable.

But it is not absolute.

Open seats do present opportunities for the party that does not occupy the White House, but Democrats have to be selective about which ones they pursue. Kondik says they need to net at least half a dozen Republican–held open seats to be on track to seize the majority in the House. The rest, he wrote, will need to be taken from the officeholders. His estimate is that Democrats will need to beat 15 to 20 incumbents head to head.

That may seem like a challenge, but Kondik insists the number is not too high by historical standards.

Time will tell.

Losing Another Part of My Childhood

---

A snowy day in another January many years ago. Matt is second from right.

---

Life happens in waves.

Life is also, as John Lennon observed, "what happens while you're busy making other plans."

With that in mind, I have been writing a lot about death lately. I didn't plan it that way. It's just how it has worked out.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I wrote about the death of my favorite journalism professor.

There have been other times when I have been touched personally by death but not lately — until this week. Death is a topic no writer can avoid for long, though. Shortly before Thanksgiving Charles Manson died. A few days ago the mastermind of the notorious 1964 triple slayings in Mississippi died.

As I say, I have enjoyed a respite from personal experience with death — but that never lasts.

And my vacation from the deaths of personal acquaintances ended this week when I learned that a fellow who grew up near me in Central Arkansas passed away. I don't know the specifics, but I have heard it was heart related.

We were friends. I can't say we were best friends or anything like that. He was about six months older, which isn't a lot, even when you're kids and months seem like years — but, because of when our birthdays fell on the calendar, he was a year ahead of me in school, and so he graduated the year before I did. I always felt like that was a bit of a barrier between us as we got older. We went to school each day with different classmates. We had different teachers.

Still we were practically neighbors. We lived in the country — where neighbors has a different meaning than it does in a city or town. We didn't live in houses that were so close that we could see each other's front doors. You had to do some walking through tree–filled hillsides to get from one to the other.

But we were neighbors. My brother and I played with Matt and his younger brother in the afternoons. Our parents socialized regularly.

Would we have done that if we had lived in town? I don't know. Options tend to be much more limited when you live in the country.

But what might have been is speculation. What was — well, that is a matter of fact.

And since I learned of Matt's death, my thoughts keep returning to memories of my childhood — and what was.

Matt's father built a treehouse that we kids used a lot in the summer. It gets hot and humid in Arkansas in the summer, but we spent many summer nights in that treehouse, playing card games and doing things that kids do when the seemingly limitless free time of summer stretches out before them. Heat and humidity was a small price to pay for all that freedom.

Sometimes the four of us would spend the night in that treehouse. We would lug our sleeping bags up there, then we would sleep on top of them because it was too suffocating to try to sleep inside our sleeping bags.

That treehouse was kind of like a junior frat house, though. We didn't do much sleeping there, and things tended to get broken. Mostly we played cards — and Monopoly — by the light of a lantern or told ghost stories.

When it was quiet in the treehouse, I would sit and let the light summer breeze wash over me, and I would look at the stars sparkling in the sky and the shimmering moon.

We all learned to ride bicycles at about the same time, and that really was like being set free. That was the first time that we were truly mobile, and from that moment on if we were going anywhere we were on our bikes. No longer did we need someone to take us to a neighbor's house a couple of miles down the road. We could get on our bikes and take ourselves there.

Later on, of course, cars replaced bikes, and our journeys took us even farther from home. But that came later.

Our parents and their vehicles still had a place in our lives. We rarely got snow in Central Arkansas, but when we did, we usually needed Matt's father's truck to take us to school. I remember all of us piling into the small cab of that truck (this was before the days of club cabs) on winter mornings and listening to his tape of Charley Pride's greatest hits as we rode into town.

Matt's family moved to Arkansas from Texas when he was in elementary school, and there was always friction between us when the Arkansas Razorbacks played the Texas Longhorns in anything — but especially football. Both our loyalties were to the places where our roots were.

So it was ironic that Matt stayed in my hometown the rest of his life — and I moved to Texas.

Sports always played a prominent role in our relationship. When we were about 8 or 9, we collected and swapped baseball cards and football cards — as many boys did (and, I presume, still do). We usually watched major sports events together, and we played the games as best we could.

Folks in town had the advantage over us in the latter. They had empty lots and open fields in which to play. We lived in the country, which was rocky and hilly. If we wanted to play touch football, we had to do it in the dirt road that slithered past our homes. That was not a problem, though. People seldom drove along that road in those days, and we could usually hear cars coming long before they reached us, giving us time to clear off the road until they went past.

I remember one unusually snowy winter that brought a significant snowfall, not just the usual dusting, and we couldn't wait to play football in it — because we could actually play tackle football for a change.

We soon learned that playing football in snow is a lot colder and wetter than it looks on TV. But when we had had enough, we went to one of our homes — where there would be tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches to warm us up.

Matt was a much better athlete than I was. He played youth baseball with my brother (who was also a better athlete than I was), and I remember watching his games with a touch of envy. Matt looked like a big–league ballplayer in his Little League uniform, whether he was playing in a game or getting a snow cone between games.

As I understand it, Matt coached youth baseball after he grew up.

Matt and I seldom saw each other as adults. The news of Matt's death, consequently, triggers no memories of my adult years — it seems to me that the last time I saw Matt was at my high school class' fifth reunion (Matt wasn't in my class, but his wife was) — but plenty of memories of my childhood.

While I am mourning the loss of my childhood friend, I am also mourning the inevitable loss of my childhood. Matt wasn't my first childhood friend to die — and, unless I'm the next one to go, he certainly won't be the last.

But it is a stark reminder of the constant state of change in which we all must exist.

It is also a reminder that life is short, much too short to not do the things you love. Matt's life was shorter than I ever would have expected when we were growing up. I hope he spent it doing things he loved to do.

And I hope I do the things I love to do before my time on this planet runs out.

One Man's Death

---

---

As I wrote here when Charles Manson died less than two months ago, I get no joy from hearing that another human being has passed away, even one who caused great pain and suffering.

That, essentially, is how I received the news yesterday that Edgar Ray Killen, the mastermind in the conspiracy to murder three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, died in prison a few days shy of his 93rd birthday.

By modern standards, plotting to murder three people usually merits little attention outside the community where such an act occurs.

But the '64 murders were different. Everyone from the president on down was watching developments in Mississippi. A priority was given to finding the missing civil rights workers; then, when their bodies were discovered, the emphasis shifted to bringing their killer(s) to justice.

Killen, an organizer for the Ku Klux Klan, was not present when the workers were abducted and murdered, but he was the one who coordinated everything — then made sure he had an alibi.

Homicide is usually a state charge, and juries in the South of the 1960s tended to be all white — and to acquit white defendants in the slayings of blacks. It was believed the only way a conviction could be obtained was through the federal judicial system, and Killen was among 18 men who, in 1967, faced federal charges of violating the civil rights of the three young men.

Seven of the defendants were convicted and sentenced to from three to 10 years in prison, but the jury couldn't agree on Killen. Eleven voted for conviction, but one refused, saying she did not believe a man of God could participate in something like that.

Killen was a part–time Baptist preacher.

He was convicted of participating in the murders in 2005, 41 years to the day after the triple slaying that inspired the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning," and spent the rest of his life in prison. But he was convicted of manslaughter. So much time had passed since the murders that many witnesses had died, and the jury did not have enough evidence for a homicide conviction. Still three consecutive 20–year sentences were likely to be more than the 80–year–old Killen could survive.

And, indeed, he did not.

Since Killen's death, the only things I have seen written about him were news accounts of his demise. I have seen no columns, no editorials, no commentaries of any kind about him or the era in which he lived — and that he influenced.

I'm not sure what to make of that because I certainly expected to see something, particularly in a polarized time like this. It was only a few months ago, after all, that statues of Confederate soldiers were being brought down from coast to coast — and the Confederacy ceased to exist more than half a century before Killen's birth.

Killen was from the 20th century, about the same age as a fellow who lived down the road from me in central Arkansas. He wasn't, as far as I know, a member of the Klan, but he was a segregationist and an unsuccessful candidate for first governor and then U.S. senator when I was in elementary school.

Well, that was what the public saw. I saw a man who was kind and treated me like a member of the family. In fact, I spent many of my waking hours outside of school at his house, playing with his twin sons.

When he committed suicide eight years ago, I was stunned by the hateful comments I saw on social media sites where folks from my home state tend to congregate.

It was probably because of that experience that I anticipated an equally rabid reaction to Killen's death. Once again, I am stunned — but happily so.

I am inclined to think that maybe that is a good thing. Maybe the fact that a notorious Klansman like Edgar Ray Killen can die in prison and cause barely a ripple is a sign of a maturing society.

That is a welcome development when words like racist, sexist and Nazi are thrown around almost casually.

It is important, once in awhile at least, to be reminded of what those words really mean — and for whom the label is appropriate.