Ask Americans which public figures they most admire, and surveys say three names always surface: Secretary of State Colin Powell, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But political analysts tell us none of these national heroes could ever become president because they all belong to a faction whose heyday came and went almost a hundred years ago: progressive Republicans in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.
While political oddsmakers have written off Teddy Roosevelt's heirs, the nation's publishers have invested heavily in them, and, over the past year, memoirs by McCain and Giuliani have hit the shelves, accompanied by new biographies of T.R. and McCain as well. Together with Powell's best-selling 1996 autobiography and two of the latest analyses of American politics in the era of George W. Bush, these books explain why progressive Republicans appeal to most voters but appall GOP insiders: From Roosevelt's Bull Moose movement to McCain's Straight Talk Express, their muscular reformism threatens to run over too many entrenched interests.
In spite of their slim chances of ever winning the White House or even capturing state and local offices outside the Northeast (Arizona, with its love of mavericks from Barry Goldwater to Morris Udall, seems an exception), the modern-day Bull Moose continue to fascinate authors and audiences alike. A century after he became the nation's youngest president, Theodore Roosevelt still captivates modern readers, and Kathleen Dalton's recent biography Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, (Knopf, 736 pages, $35) finds new points to make about him, even after two magisterial biographies by the historian Edmund Morris.
In Dalton's view, Roosevelt was the prophet of the Progressive Era and the pioneer of the modern presidency. Taking office as industrialism transformed the nation, inequalities increased, and immigrants flocked to the major cities, Roosevelt saw the federal government, and the presidency in particular, as the only institutions that could unify a nation in danger of dividing along ethnic and economic lines. Thus, he pioneered programs that regulated big business and evened the odds for workers, women and consumers, from challenging corporate mergers to regulating food and drugs, and opposing child labor to supporting women's right to vote.
As the first president to be conscious of his celebrity status, Roosevelt also used what he called his bully pulpit to change the ways that Americans thought about themselves and their neighbors. Challenging hyphenated Americanism among immigrants and Know-Nothingism among the native-born, Roosevelt called for a new American identity that could be shared by all who put aside the prejudices of the past and the loyalties of the Old World. More than any national leader of his times, he also strived to include African-Americans, inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House, condemning lynchings, and delivering his last public speech on a platform with W. E. B. DuBois.
To be sure, the former Rough Rider of the Spanish-American War was an imperialist as well as an internationalist, but for characteristically quirky reasons. Up until his death, shortly after the end of World War I, Roosevelt seemed to support military involvements of all kinds because they unified Americans, encouraging a spirit of sacrifice and providing a rationale for reforms that hit hardest at the most privileged, such as taxes on incomes and inheritances.
Even now, Roosevelt is the template for today's muscular moderates. Giuliani's memoir, Leadership (Miramax Books, 407 pages, $25.95), paints a self-portrait of an aggressive reformer whose career resembled Roosevelt's early years in New York City. Just as Roosevelt had served as president of the Police Board crusading against criminals and crooked cops, so Giuliani began his career as a U.S. attorney investigating scandals on Wall Street and devoted much of his mayoralty to shaking up the Police Department so that it could fight street crime more effectively.
With his zest for public theatrics, Roosevelt would have envied Giuliani's commanding and reassuring presence in the New York and national media in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Similarly, the advocate of Americanism would have admired Giuliani's summons to New Yorkers to demonstrate more civic spirit, although Teddy in his time was much more sympathetic than Rudy in our time to the advocates of the dispossessed.
While Powell is less flamboyant and much more reluctant to commit the nation to war, Roosevelt would also have admired the soldier-turned-statesman. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell tells the sotory in My American Journey of a working-class kid from the South Bronx who found the opportunity to serve his country and advance his career in armed forces that were integrated three decades after Theodore Roosevelt offered to lead black troops into battle himself. Powell's climb to some of the most powerful positions in the nation confirms Roosevelt's vision of an America open to those who commit themselves to serving it, just as Giuliani's career vindicates Roosevelt's view that the immigrants of his era from Southern and Eastern Europe would come to share his values of clean government.
While Giuliani recalls Roosevelt the urban reformer and Powell vindicates Roosevelt the liberal militarist, McCain best exemplifies the Bull Moose maverick who tried to return to the White House in 1912 by challenging his conservative Republican successor, William Howard Taft, in the primaries and leading his own Progressive Party in the general election.
As McCain recalls in his memoir, Worth the Fighting For (Random House, 396 pages, $25.95), and the journalist Paul Alexander recounts in Man of the People: The Life of John McCain (John Wiley & Sons, 416 pages, $27.95), the Arizona conservative, like the New York aristocrat before him, has evolved into a reformer who is toughest on the most privileged classes and entrenched interests.
During his 2000 campaign for the presidency and over the past two years of George W. Bush's presidency, McCain has parted company with most of his party by supporting stringent campaign finance reforms, opposing top-bracket tax cuts, and working to regulate health maintenance organizations, gun manufacturers and other major industries. These stands make it as unlikely that McCain could capture the 2004 Republican nomination from Bush as it was for Roosevelt to challenge Taft in 1912.
As the popularity of Powell, Giuliani, and McCain testifies, while muscular moderation doesn't win Republican presidential primaries, it does appeal to the electorate at large.
Indeed, in their recent prescription for what is now the nation's opposition party, The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner, 213 pages, $24), the journalist John B. Judis and the demographer Ruy Teixeira propose a "progressive centrism" that would be as congenial to an heir of Theodore Roosevelt as a supporter of Bill Clinton. However, in Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (Basic Books, 224 pages, $24), the political analyst Michael Lind maintains that the GOP has now been taken over by the same social, racial and economic conservatives who opposed Roosevelt's reforms a century ago.
When a political approach is popular among the electorate but stymied by entrenched elites, it's a sign that something is wrong with the political system itself. That's a challenge that would have infuriated and invigorated the old Rough Rider, who, at the time of his death, according to Dalton, was planning another maverick presidential run that would have been even more uphill than his charge up San Juan Hill.
David Kusnet, who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He is the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties and a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.