On The Road With John Edwards - not the cold reader, the other one

Ben Smith's Blog - Politico.com:

"Can JRE pull off a JFK, or an RFK (asks Politico chief political writer Mike Allen, who is sharing guestblogging duties while Ben is on vacation)? John Edwards plans to announce Monday that he’ll take a break from fund-raising and campaigning in early-voting states next week for a three-day, eight-state, 12-city “Road to One America” tour aimed at calling attention to poverty in the deep South, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Rust Belt."

The Breck Girl - according to that other Politico blog, not yours truly here at OldPolitico - is set to take his roadshow on a tour highlighting poverty in America.

For some reason, Mike Allen wants to see this as harking back to the political tactics of the brothers Kennedy, JFK in 1960 and RFK in 1968. For example:

"The photogenic swing is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s repeated coal-country campaigning before the West Virginia primary of 1960. His overwhelming victory ended Catholicism as an issue in the campaign and brought national attention to Appalachian poverty. Twenty-eight years later, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis donned a hard hat and overalls for an hour-long tour of a West Virginia coal mine."

I remember JFK campaigning in West Virginia, but I don't recall it being billed as rich boy slumming. If it had been, it is doubtful that he would have crushed Sen. Hubert Horatio Humphrey (D-MN)in the primary.

There were, and are still, a lot of proud, independent folks clinging to those hillsides and working the mines and hard-scrabble farms; some of them - the Pauleys of Charleston - cousins of my maternal grandmother. Great-grandfather Pauley was an organizer for the United Mine Workers back when that put a price on your head and forced your immediate family into hiding. Those people in West Virginia appreciated all the attention. I remember eating often in a restaurant in Charles Town which had little brass plates on some of the plain wooden chairs, each inscribed with the name of a politician who had stopped there and sat in that chair - JFK, HHH, and several lesser lights.

Being put on display as a living museum exhibit of poverty would have been deeply offensive. The psychological value of a big win in West Virginia for JFK was that the state was one of the whitest and most protestant and the most southern of the few states (15 plus DC) on the primary schedule at that time.

As for Dukakis in his miner's hat that seems to me to have harked back to the Roaring Twenties when donning absurd headgear was de rigeur for politicos. Did you ever see a photo of Calvin Coolidge in an Indian headdress? Stunning! Unfortunately, Dukakis skipped the part of the Dress For Success manual that said small men should avoid large headwear. The most absurd image of his campaign was Dukakis sitting in the open hatch of a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and commo rig. After that he was toast.

Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for making poverty tours fashionable. Commercial network television, of all institutions, set the tone with prime-time documentaries like Harvest of Shame (CBS Reports, 1960 - aired after the election) and Walk In My Shoes (ABC Close-Up, 1961); and Michael Harrington's book The Other America probably played a role, too.

LBJ followed up his January 1964 announcement of a War on Poverty with his nine-state tour of poverty in Appalachia in 1964. He may have been treading some of the same ground as JFK four years earlier, but this time there was intentional focus on poverty.

Immitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, Johnson should have been gratified by the alacrity with which other Democrats launched their own tours of poverty or hunger. These included Fritz Hollings in South Carolina and Bill Spong in Virginia.

Give the Devil his due, to quote another old chestnut, LBJ deserves the credit (or blame as many Southerners thought) for pointing to backward conditions in a region struggling to attract industry from the north and overseas to take up the slack from the decline of agriculture.