In 1930 the Depression broke the elephantarians of the day for a generation -- no, two generations. The fall election produced a donk house, if by a razorish margin. The House top jackass was John Nance Garner of Texas.
Cactus Jack still faced a Hoover White House, so instead of aiding "efforts by the administration to bring relief to the people," Jack led a very clever obstructionist donk flank fire -- two more years of "let the elephants boil in their own mud bath." A kind of domestic "let it get even worse," a "cunctation" with bite-your-ass partisan spite.
Is this the Rahm and Nan plan?
The story has two stages: stage one -- donks gain the white house two years later. Enter the New Deal era, as Hoover flees the stage of history festering from scalp to groin with stink worms. Cactus Jack got maneuvered into what he famously called a "bucket of warm piss" -- i.e. the Vice Presidency, for a two-term hitch.
Second stage: this clever feller from the land of sage and sidewinders becomes, in FDR's second term, a leader in the resurrection of old-style white-sheet dixie donkery -- a new confederacy of reaction, anti-worker, anti-civil rights, anti-FDR -- ultimately anti everything without a white pecker and a plug of chaw in its cheek. In short, a full-bore cotton-country counterpart to New York's Al Smith.
So let us absorb this clever gent's legacy, and beware his avatars.
