Susan Eisenhower has endorsed Barack Obama for president.
"You'll have to forgive me for being an Eisenhower Republican," joked Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the former five-star general and two-term Republican president, who helped lead America to victory over the forces of Axis during World War II, then oversaw a period of unprecedented prosperity during the 1950s. Speaking on the telephone on Aug. 7 from her Washington office at The Eisenhower Institute, a think tank where she serves as president emeritus, the journalist-turned-foreign policy wonk explained her decision to publicly support Barack Obama after a lifetime in the Republican Party.
"I don't know how much you know about my grandfather's administration," Eisenhower said. "But that administration stood for multilateral engagement, balancing the budget. They were the party of civil rights, they were the party of environmental progress. That was the Republican Party of the 1950s. That doesn't sound like the Republican Party we know today.
If you look at the way Obama's run his campaign, Obama's running his campaign in a way an Eisenhower Republican would have run his campaign. He raises a lot of money," Eisenhower, 56, said, by way of explaining the similarities she sees between her grandfather and the likely Democratic nominee. "He has very little debt. Anybody who wants to make him out as this wide-eyed liberal - I just don't see any evidence for that, not in the way he runs his campaign. And this tells you a lot about how he can administer things, how he manages things, how he deals with situations.
As a surrogate for the Obama campaign since her declaration of support in February, Eisenhower can be seen as merely another moderate Republican backing Obama. But she could also be on the frontlines of something bigger. As we approach the Democratic and Republican National Conventions of 2008, we do so as the coalitions of both parties appear ever more fractured. And it is the GOP coalition that could be in greater disarray.
True, the Democrats are still scared by the divisions of a hard-fought primary season. Democrats, of course, have been used to intra-party fights since Chicago in 1968. But in the Republican Party, the fissures might mean something more long-term. These could be the fault lines of a new sort of national realignment. Fiscal conservatives, in addition to many foreign- policy pragmatists, are dissatisfied with Bush administration policies. And they might flee the party as well as its leader. Should Obama win in November, he might do so with the aid of moderate Republicans like Eisenhower, whose power within the GOP has been diminishing for decades. Eisenhower and Republicans like her are at a pivotal moment.
They can see a new chance for relevancy should Obama win, for they could then become part of a new majority coalition. This could be an amalgam, similar to the one Ronald Reagan put together with his win in 1980 - when Democrats, frustrated with President Jimmy Carter, helped forge the Reagan Revolution.
In this light, Eisenhower is part of a vein within the Republican Party. Indeed, this group has been losing power since Sen. Barry M. Goldwater's nomination in 1964. But it now seems acutely at a loss, as its members find themselves unwanted, without a real champion to fight for their cause. This GOP faction is less concerned with eliminating gay marriage or sustaining what many economists have viewed as crippling tax cuts, than with the pragmatic aspects of how the party sees itself and what that means for the United States and the world. Whatever say this group once had in the GOP is fading.
Eisenhower, for her part does see the plates shifting - if only for a moment. "The thing we have to ask ourselves for this election is whether this is a small temporary change or permanent realignment," said Eisenhower, whose father, John, served as ambassador to Belgium under Richard M. Nixon but supported Sen. John Kerry over George W. Bush in 2004. "Political parties change over decades, to seize and capitalize on opportunities. But what can happen - whether you're a Democrat or Republican - is you can wake up one morning and find yourself looking at a party whose standard-bearer doesn't reflect the values that brought you to the party in the first place.
I can say that, for this election, I'm supporting Barack Obama, because I think he will represent the future of America. He is the future of America."
Unlike many prominent Obama supporters, Eisenhower did so by her own grown-up accord. The two had first met in the winter of 2007, after the Illinois senator had called asking Eisenhower to meet with his staff. As a practice, Eisenhower has always made it a point to meet with candidates or their staffs regardless of the party, and did so then. She was impressed by what she'd seen out of his people, and by the inquisitiveness of the man himself. Over the next few months, the two met three or four more times, and she grew to respect his ability to think about issues in a nuanced, post-Cold War fashion.
After initially telling Obama that she wouldn't endorse anyone, Eisenhower decided to say something in the middle of the gritty Democratic primary - with a February op-ed article in The Washington Post, headlined, bluntly, "Why I'm backing Barack Obama."
"We have to go back to my own tradition," Eisenhower said last week. "My grandfather thought there were three things that comprised our national security: One, our ability to address our adversaries. Second, he put economic security as absolutely essential to our national security. Thirdly, he valued the state of our moral authority. Never has that three-pillared way of looking at our national security been more crucial. By his own admission, John McCain says he doesn't know that much about economics, and from a national-security perspective I think that's noteworthy. The third issue of our moral authority has to examine the reasons for why we went into Iraq. "By temperament and genetics, I do recognize that we're already there," Eisenhower said of the current U.S. occupation.
"But we have to understand that my grandfather, a five-star general, understood that staying in Korea wasn't a sustainable operation either - and got the United States out of there. "Asking whether something is viable or not has nothing to do with patriotism," she emphasized, "You can conclude you're damaging your long-term national interests by holding the status quo. One of the great expressions I grew up with as a child is 'Perfect is the enemy of good.' We have to move forward in a good way because we're never going to see a consensus on anything."
Now, with all three of her grandfather's national-security legs wobbling, Eisenhower saw no great carpentry skills offered by any of the Republicans running for the Oval Office. But in Obama, Eisenhower said she saw both promise and a real understanding of what was needed to repair the stunning damage done to those components of national security over the past eight years. Moreover she scoffed at the shots McCain's taken at his rival's patriotism and the recent television attacks labeling the 47-year-old junior senator as a man without substance because of his celebrity and the grand nature in which he often talks.
"For people who are being critical about Barack Obama talking about hope," Eisenhower said, "I don't think they understand the first thing about American rhetoric and moving this country forward. Ronald Reagan was not a success because he had people scared and frightened all the time. He inspired thousands of people with hope when the Cold War was stagnant and inflation was high and the country sour. We now have another figure right now who has brought all sorts of people into the political process, who has convinced a significant number of people that they were welcome on his team, and has offered a crisp new chance to turn the page internationally."
