American Politics’ Oedipus Complex
The Article: Oedipus Rex Complex by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times.
The Text: American politics bristles with Oedipal drama.
Sons struggling to live up to fathers. Sons striving to outdo fathers. Sons scheming to avenge fathers. Sons burning to one-up fathers. Sons yearning to impress fathers who vanished early on. Sons leaning on fathers. Sons using fathers as reverse-play books.
John McCain was the raffish and rebellious Navy flier son of a stern four-star admiral who commanded the Vietnam theater where McCain was a P.O.W. Al Gore was the wooden good son of a Tennessee senator who was a fiery orator.
Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama had to climb the ladder without the huge benefit that J.F.K., W., Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. had — the obsessive support of wealthy and well-connected dads.
In November, the senior Jon Huntsman, a billionaire chemical executive, tried a last-ditch effort to buoy his son’s campaign in New Hampshire by rounding up other wealthy donors to pony up money for a major advertising campaign for “Junior,” as the candidate is still known in Utah.
Mitt is leaving Iowa far stronger than he arrived. It’s daunting, so soon after “Junior” Bush crashed the Bush family station wagon into the globe in an effort to both avenge and outshine his dad, to gear up for another Republican presidential candidate whose résumé copies his famous Republican father and whose relationship with dad sculpts his outlook.
Like W., Mitt Romney studied his father’s mistakes so he wouldn’t repeat them. Because George Romney, who achieved success as a car company executive and Michigan governor, jumped into the 1968 presidential race without the proper preparation on foreign affairs and a concrete position on Vietnam, his son is always overprepared.
The son is programmed because the father of the Rambler was rambling, impulsive and too candid, losing his footing in the race when he told an interviewer that he suffered a “brainwashing” in 1965 from military commanders and diplomats in Vietnam that compelled him to support the war, before snapping out of it.
While his father was often described as a force of nature, Mitt is more like a sea of Styrofoam.
Both Al Gore senior and George Romney were blunt and tough, sticking to core convictions even when it hurt them. By contrast, their less charismatic sons were more malleable, pandering to the right and playing chameleon. Gore père lost his Senate seat because he refused to back off his opposition to the Vietnam war. Romney père lost his presidential dream after the brainwashing claim because his verbal missteps made critics question his intellectual heft.
As Eugene McCarthy quipped, brainwashing was too strong a word: “All that was needed in the case of George Romney was a light rinse.”
If the fathers suffered for being authentic — they were both right that America could not defeat Communism with a war in Vietnam — the sons have suffered for seeming too inauthentic.
Does Mitt Romney cringe a bit when he accuses the first African-American president of trying to create “an entitlement society,” raising the specter of welfare lines in inner cities, given that his father was such a bold champion of civil rights and solving racial problems in the inner cities that it got him in trouble with Mormon Church elders?
Does he wonder what his dad, who spoke out against the futility of an earlier misguided war, would think of his assertion that President Obama’s move to end the Iraq war represented an “astonishing failure”?
Unlike W., who loved his father but chafed at his long shadow, preferring to present himself as Ronald Reagan’s heir, Mitt had a clear-cut case of hero worship for his dad. While W. never asked his father’s advice on invading Iraq, even though Poppy Bush had experience routing Saddam, Mitt loved getting yellow legal pads full of advice from his dad when he vainly tried to unseat Senator Ted Kennedy. W. rarely talked about his father when he campaigned, wanting to be seen as his own man and a true Texan and conservative.
Even though Mitt is far more conservative these days than his moderate dad, he loves talking about his parents on the trail, recounting the time they took him in the Rambler for a cross-country drive to see monuments. He has called his dad “the real deal” and the definition of “a successful human” and explained his political ambition as “a family gene.” He has a poster of his dad’s gubernatorial campaign, with the slogan “Keep Michigan On The Move With A Working Governor,” hanging in his campaign bus.
Ann Romney was also nuts about George Romney, who proxy-wooed her while his son was a Mormon missionary in France. At a final rally in Des Moines on Tuesday morning, Mrs. Romney said she was thinking of her husband’s father. “We would never,” she told the crowd, “have had this happen if not for George Romney.”
“He was the one,” she concluded, “whose shoulders we are standing on.”
