Jeffersonian democracy
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- The partisanship of this poisonous campaign season resonates here at the mountaintop retreat of Thomas Jefferson, a politician who never responded to personal attacks but never dissuaded surrogates from savaging his opponents on his behalf, either.
Time and reverence have softened the realpolitik in Jefferson's legacy, of course, emphasizing instead the larger contributions of the president who laid the philosophical foundations of a nation in the Declaration of Independence and doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase.
But, driving up Little Mountain to the neoclassical mansion Jefferson designed in his native Albemarle County, it is impossible not to hear echoes of 1796 and 1800 in the radio reports of "swift boat" skirmishes in the current presidential campaign. The substance of the attacks against John F. Kerry's war record, as calculated and unsubstantiated as were rumors that John Adams was a secret monarchist, are just as irrelevant to the pressing challenges facing the nation in both eras. And claims by George W. Bush of ignorance of the attacks on his rival are as disingenuous as were Jefferson's two centuries ago.
Bush and Kerry would do well to look backward before carrying the campaign another step in this venomous and distracting direction. There is too much of substance at stake, at home and abroad, to risk driving away even more Americans in disgust from the polls this fall.
Jefferson and Adams faced each other in a political rematch in 1800 that was infused with even more partisan fervor than that fueling this year's campaign because of the contested presidential election of 2000. By the practice of the time, Jefferson's close loss to Adams in 1796 had elected him vice president in an administration whose policies he abhorred.
Anybody-But-Bush has its antecedent in the conviction of supporters of Adams the Federalist and Jefferson the Republican that the election of their opponent spelled doom for the American experiment. "The battle was to the death, and taking prisoners was not permitted," historian Joseph J. Ellis has written about the efforts of Jefferson and James Madison to oust Adams and the Federalists from power. Adams's partisans, in turn, warned, in the words of one hyperbolic Federalist pamphlet, that if Jefferson, a sympathizer with the goals of the French Revolution, were elected, "The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes."
The Bush campaign's contention that it is unaffiliated with the Vietnam veterans challenging Kerry's war record has its mirror image in Jefferson's specious denials that he had any hand in the scurrilous attacks on Adams by a scandalmonger named James Callender, who claimed Adams was intent on being named president for life.
Jefferson's ideological opposition to Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, assaults on civil liberties with echoes in Bush's Patriot Act, had apparently convinced him that the end justified the means.
What has motivated Roy F. Hoffman, a leader of the group that bills itself as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to turn on Kerry, a former naval officer whose courage in Vietnam he has praised in the past, is less clear than the source of his financial and logistical support: the political partisans of the president. Kerry's antiwar activities after Vietnam or an unflattering portrayal of Hoffman in an authorized biography of Kerry might have soured him on the Democratic presidential nominee, but the cause is less important than the facts, which do not support Hoffman's version of events in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.
Sadly, the Kerry campaign only compounds matters by suggesting that Hoffman's attack book be pulled from the shelves. Jefferson's political tactics were unworthy of the Sage of Monticello, but his reverence for the First Amendment stands the test of time.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
