The Grand Tradition of Flip-Flopping

By Richard Brookhiser

The line of politicians who have had a change of heart about the war in Iraq keeps getting longer. Republican Senator John Warner, who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force there, now wants the troops to start coming home. Democratic Congressman Brian Baird, who opposed the war, wants to give the surge a chance: "Progress is being made and there is real reason for hope." But politicians are often anxious about changing their minds. They know opponents are waiting to hammer them as opportunists or just plain confused, as Mitt Romney, dogged by accusations of flip-flopping over abortion, and John Kerry, who ineptly said he had voted for a supplemental funding bill before voting against it, can attest. Yet our nation's leaders often change their minds. If they didn't, we might still be slave-owning British subjects. When and why they do so can be instructive.

Wanting to be seen as responsible and practical, many politicians often claim to be reacting to new information. In 1966, during his first race to become Governor of California, Ronald Reagan pledged not to raise income taxes, declaring that his feet were "in concrete" on the issue. State income taxes were collected by withholding, and Reagan believed taxes should be obvious and painful. But once in office, he found that there was no other revenue stream that could balance the state budget, and so he submitted an economic plan that called for higher withholding taxes. "The sound you hear," he said at a press conference, "is the sound of concrete cracking."

Reagan wasn't the first pol to reverse himself when a new office brought with it a new worldview. When James Madison was a Congressman, he argued for a stronger Federal Government and took a lead role in creating one as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. But in 1798, as a leader of the fight against the war measures of President John Adams, he became an advocate of states' rights, urging his native Virginia and its fellow states to resist "dangerous" exercises of federal power. In 1815, when Madison was President, he had to fend off a threat by New Englanders to wield the power of their states against his war measures, which they found "dangerous." Madison had a supple mind--supple enough to reconcile his shifting position, which he attributed to changing circumstances. "The state of things at the time," he explained, was "always a key to the arguments employed." The most important circumstance, however, seems to have been where he sat.

Sometimes the desire for a job makes a politician see the light. For the first two decades of his career, Lyndon Johnson was a New Deal liberal, with white Southern views on race (he called Harry Truman's early efforts on civil rights "a farce and a sham"). This combination made him a popular Texas Congressman and Senator, but he also wanted to be President. After a stumbling run as Texas' favorite son in 1956, he realized that his ambitions required him to change his profile on civil rights. The next year, after epic wheeling and dealing as Senate majority leader, he produced the first successful civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It was weak enough to be supported by fellow Southerners, who constituted his political base, yet it offered Northern liberals the prospect of future progress. This balancing act did not win him the Democratic nomination in 1960, but it allowed John F. Kennedy to make Johnson his running mate.

At their best, politicians change their minds because their principles tell them to. John Quincy Adams, son of Founding Father John Adams, became a national figure in his own right by working with Southerners. President George Washington, a Virginian, gave him his first job. President James Monroe, another Virginian, made him Secretary of State. And Speaker of the House Henry Clay, a Kentuckian, helped him win the presidency when the election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives. For most of his career, Adams believed the South would handle slavery on its own, wiping the great blot from national life. By his 60s, however, he had heard too many Southerners praising slavery as a good thing. When elected to Congress after losing the White House in 1828, Adams spent the remainder of his life flaying slavery, supporting the mutineers on the slave ship Amistad and the right of citizens to deluge Congress with antislavery petitions.

No decision, of course, is ever the result of one pure motive. Johnson, his biographer Robert Caro argues, always had reservoirs of genuine compassion that his ambition finally allowed him to tap. John Quincy Adams became a principled scourge only after his ambition to be elected President had been gratified (and his ambition to be re-elected denied). Concrete cracks for many reasons. The sound you hear is politics--and human nature--at work.