Excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times on Thursday on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hubert Humphrey:
"His Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act, introduced in May 1975, when unemployment was at a post-Depression high of 9 percent, proposed a sort of domestic World Bank to route capital to job creators. (It spoke to his conviction, in a knee-jerk, anti-corporate age, that pro-labor and pro-business policies were complementary.)
And at a time when other liberals were besotted with affirmative action as a strategy to undo the cruel injustices of American history, Humphrey pointed out that race-based remedies could only prove divisive when good jobs were disappearing for everyone. Liberal policy, he said, must stress "common denominators - mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears."
In 1976 he joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent - and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.
It sounds heretical now. But this newspaper endorsed it then, while 70 percent of Americans believed the government should offer jobs to everyone who wanted one."
The op-ed piece also talks about how we revered Ronald Reagan on the anniversary of his 100th birthday but forgot about Humphrey for his. Of course, Reagan being a former president had a lot to do with it. It also got me thinking though: many of today's conservatives hold up Reagan as an icon even though he provided amnesty to illegal immigrants and raised taxes during his presidency.
If Humphrey was held by progressives in the same regard, would his positions that are contrary to modern progressive views also be overlooked? The skeptic in me thinks that is likely so.
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