Longtime Obama confidant David Axelrod is making the rounds to flog his new book, "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics." Along the way, he has parroted a textbook liberal myth, confident it will go unchallenged by simpatico buddies in the media and surely aware that low-information voters who comprise the Democrats' base won't have a clue anyway.
Appearing on Sunday's Meet the Press, Axelrod took part in a panel discussion on Jon Stewart's impending departure from The Daily Show when he tossed out a whopper about a controversial American priest of the last century --
MTP HOST CHUCK TODD: Big news affecting both politics and show biz this week, Jon Stewart announcing he's stepping down from The Daily Show after 17 years. I want to bring in the panel on this and Joe (Scarborough) and Ax (Todd's chummy nickname for Axelrod), I want you guys to deal with this first -- liberals are just in mourning, Mr. Axelrod (so formal all of a sudden) about losing Stewart. (Who'll tell us what to think?!). And it was a reminder to me that, when you think about it, political satire dominated by liberals right now -- Stewart, Oliver, Colbert, you throw in Bill Maher. Talk radio, conservative talk radio, it's, you know, Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt. Liberals can't succeed on radio and conservatives aren't succeeding in political satire. Do you know why?
AXELROD: Well, Chuck, there's a long history of this. You go back to the beginning of radio and Father Coughlin.
TODD: Yeah.
AXELROD: Right-wing radio has always been populist, it's always had huge audiences. There hasn't been a corollary on the left, but satire goes to, I think, kind of a more elite audience and therefore it radiates more.
TODD: It's the elites, it's the liberals, it's the, you know, the traveling salesman ...
AXELROD: Yeah.
First of all, Ax, or Mr. Ax if you'd prefer, Coughlin's surname was pronounced "Cog-lin," not "Cough-lin." Getting this wrong is like expounding on the fallacies of "Ann" Rand.
Coughlin was a fiery Catholic priest whose sermons were broadcast over the airwaves in the late 1920s with radio still in its infancy. Within a few years he became one of the most popular speakers in the country, his oratory reaching tens of millions of Americans.
After the stock market crash in 1929, Coughlin turned political and condemned President Herbert Hoover's "laissez-faire economics." He endorsed Franklin Roosevelt for president in the 1932 campaign, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and warned Americans that they faced a choice between "Roosevelt or Ruin" -- all solid evidence of the man's right-wing proclivities.
National Review's Jonah Goldberg, in his 2008 book "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning," addressed this misconception about Coughlin --
It is a bedrock dogma of all enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable right-winger. ... Again and again, Coughlin is referred to as "the right-wing Radio Priest" whom supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative extremists. But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects. ...
Coughlin himself was a darling among Capitol Hill Democrats, particularly the progressive bloc -- the liberals to the left of FDR who pushed him for even more aggressive reforms. In 1933 the administration was under considerable pressure to include Coughlin in the U.S. delegation to a major economic conference in London. Ten senators and seventy-five congressmen sent a petition declaring that Coughlin had "the confidence of millions of Americans." The vast majority of the signatories were Democrats. There was even a groundswell among progressives for FDR to appoint Coughlin treasury secretary. ...
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace collaborated with Coughlin in an effort to sway the administration's monetary policy further to the left. Recall that Wallace (who was Alger Hiss's boss at Agriculture) went on to become Roosevelt's penultimate vice president, the leading Soviet "useful idiot" in the United States, the editor of the New Republic, and the Progressive Party's 1948 presidential nominee. ...
So how did Coughlin suddenly become a right-winger? When did he become persona non grata in the eyes of liberal intellectuals? On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left. (emphasis in the original).
Angered that Roosevelt's New Deal was too tepid in its reforms, Coughlin in November 1934 formed the National Union for Social Justice. The main provisions of its platform -- a "just and living annual wage," "nationalizing" of "public necessities," "upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good," "conscription of wealth" if men were drafted during war, government limits on "profits acquired by any industry," and a federal mandate for production of "food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences."
Bedrock conservative principles, wouldn't you agree?
As Coughlin became increasingly shrill, demagogic, and anti-Semitic, sounding more like fellow socialist Adolf Hitler by the year, former allies on the left distanced themselves, especially after the U.S. was drawn into World War II. In 1942, his Social Justice magazine was investigated by the Attorney General for dispersing pro-Axis propaganda and the postal service suspended the periodical's second-class mailing privilege. The Archbishop of Detroit effectively silenced Coughlin from further politicizing, though he was allowed to remain at his church.
Coughlin died in 1979, a largely forgotten figure. He's seldom mentioned anymore -- except from the left as a figure purportedly of the right. But he was no more of a conservative for turning on FDR than Michael Moore is when he slams Obama as not leftist enough.
