johnpmahler
Member
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2003
- Messages
- 13
I've gotten really tired about the 'not my president/stolen election' b.s. that's been going by since last year. I can certainly recall that J.F.K. won the election by winning Illinois, won Illinois by winning huge in Chicago, and won huge in Chicago because the Daley machine turned out the cemetary vote in record numbers. ( Just becuase you're dead, doesnt mean you should'nt still vote Democratic & Vote early and vote often being long standing mottos of Chicago politics 
)
Then I ran into this, from the book 'Present at the Creation', being the memoir of Dean Acheson.
From a speech by Dean Acheson, Nov 1952. He was then the secretary of state, and Truman had just lost the election to Ike. As a result, he was going to be outof a job in a couple months. The Korean war was still hot, NATO was in it's infancy, Iran was taking on British Petroleum, things where not looking easy!
Anyway, what he said the day after the election was such a class act that it blew me away. It thows into sharp relief the behavior of too many of the politicos we have running around today.
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Most of you are so used to a Democratic Administration and recollect so little of anything else that you think ofthis state of affairs as normal. But it was not so normal. What has just happened was bound to happen. It is not only wrong to feel angry about it, it is unrealistic. Tonight you, especially the younger ones, feel angry and bitter and gypped. You exagerate the campaign and call the election a 'steal' and claim that it was won by demagogues and villifiers.
You must realize that we Democrats have been in power for a long time and it is natural and normal for there to be a change. That fact, you might as well accept, and it is not neccessarily a bad thing. You must accept it the way that some day you accept growing old.
From this moment you should not go on fighting battles that have been lost. Don't, above all, go on fighting them the way the League of Nations battle was fought over thirty years. Do what nature requires, that is to have a fallow period. Just let the field of your emotions stay barren, let new seeds germinate, until May, or next year, or until 1954. Don't read The New York Times from cover to cover every day.
Then when you come back to the scene, you will come back fresh. And you should think of the problems that exist then, and not of the problems that existed a year before. Say, "these are new problems. I am going to attack the new problems in a creative way."
....
After things have settled down a bit and the new people have taken over and are doing what they can, we will have ideas about how to solve some of the difficult questions that will come up. We will have a chance to be constructive by throwing out those ideas. If they are wise ideas, they will be picked up and be helpful. We probably won't be able ever to put our ideas into operation ourselves. But if we can think of them, and advocate them, the new people in the Democratic party, people whom we don't even know yet because they haven't appeared, will have something to go on. There is no sense in having our ideas simply ideas of how badly the Republicans are doing things. What we need to have and what the country will need to have are ideas that are constructive and helpful in solving new probems that is will face.
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)Then I ran into this, from the book 'Present at the Creation', being the memoir of Dean Acheson.
From a speech by Dean Acheson, Nov 1952. He was then the secretary of state, and Truman had just lost the election to Ike. As a result, he was going to be outof a job in a couple months. The Korean war was still hot, NATO was in it's infancy, Iran was taking on British Petroleum, things where not looking easy!
Anyway, what he said the day after the election was such a class act that it blew me away. It thows into sharp relief the behavior of too many of the politicos we have running around today.
=============================================
Most of you are so used to a Democratic Administration and recollect so little of anything else that you think ofthis state of affairs as normal. But it was not so normal. What has just happened was bound to happen. It is not only wrong to feel angry about it, it is unrealistic. Tonight you, especially the younger ones, feel angry and bitter and gypped. You exagerate the campaign and call the election a 'steal' and claim that it was won by demagogues and villifiers.
You must realize that we Democrats have been in power for a long time and it is natural and normal for there to be a change. That fact, you might as well accept, and it is not neccessarily a bad thing. You must accept it the way that some day you accept growing old.
From this moment you should not go on fighting battles that have been lost. Don't, above all, go on fighting them the way the League of Nations battle was fought over thirty years. Do what nature requires, that is to have a fallow period. Just let the field of your emotions stay barren, let new seeds germinate, until May, or next year, or until 1954. Don't read The New York Times from cover to cover every day.
Then when you come back to the scene, you will come back fresh. And you should think of the problems that exist then, and not of the problems that existed a year before. Say, "these are new problems. I am going to attack the new problems in a creative way."
....
After things have settled down a bit and the new people have taken over and are doing what they can, we will have ideas about how to solve some of the difficult questions that will come up. We will have a chance to be constructive by throwing out those ideas. If they are wise ideas, they will be picked up and be helpful. We probably won't be able ever to put our ideas into operation ourselves. But if we can think of them, and advocate them, the new people in the Democratic party, people whom we don't even know yet because they haven't appeared, will have something to go on. There is no sense in having our ideas simply ideas of how badly the Republicans are doing things. What we need to have and what the country will need to have are ideas that are constructive and helpful in solving new probems that is will face.
=====================================