SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B5
increasingly red states? Is it impossible to
imagine, for example, that a candidate who
acknowledged the failure of both parties to
stem the economic decline of the working
class might strike a responsive chord? Might a
candidate find a way to insulate herself
against the more provocative arguments of
more progressive Democrats, like “defund the
police,” while emphasizing the economic-fair-
ness arguments that bridge the gap between
the party’s wings? If Democrats could hold 60
Senate seats 11 years ago, is a return to the
majority really beyond reach?
There is a mountain of evidence that the
political alignment of states is not carved in
stone. California was once part of a “red wall”
that gave Republicans a near-lock on the
electoral college. From 1968 through 1988, it
— along with Illinois and New Jersey — voted
Republican in every presidential election.
Now all three states are deep blue. West
Virginia voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 and
Michael Dukakis eight years later. Now it is
cherry red. In January, Arizona will have two
Democratic senators for the first time since- In 1992, Bill Clinton picked the “elector-
al lock” that had given Republicans three
straight presidential landslides and won
states from Georgia to Montana. And Joe
Biden just won Georgia and Arizona, the first
time a Democrat has done that since Clinton.
In a perverse sense, the Democrats are
fortunate: They cannot build a time machine
to bring them back to 1789, so that they can
stiffen James Madison’s spine against the
small states’ demands. They cannot erase
Article V from the Constitution. They prob-
ably cannot persuade Mike Bloomberg and
other billionaires to pay for the resettlement
of a few hundred thousand Californians and
New Yorkers to the Dakotas. They have no
choice, then, but to find the messages and the
organizing tools that can break through that
new red wall that stands between their
national majority and the power to govern.
Twitter: @greenfield64
Jeff Greenfield is a veteran TV analyst, a
contributing editor to Politico and a special
correspondent for “PBS NewsHour Weekend.”retaining control. But you don’t have to look
very far back in the past to find Democrats
regularly winning Senate seats in states that
vote deeply crimson at the presidential level.
North Dakota had two Democrats in the
Senate from 1987 through 2011, and one until- Both of Montana’s senators were Demo-
crats from 2007 to 2015, and one was reelected
just two years ago. Until the 2014 midterms,
Democrats held seats from Alaska, Louisiana,
Arkansas, North Carolina, Iowa and South
Dakota.
It’s understandable that Democrats’ failure
to win even one of those seats since then
might convince the party that this is a
permanent political condition and that the
power of increasingly Republican, rural, less-
educated White voters is an impenetrable
obstacle.
That’s not what history suggests. Look at
what happened with state legislatures. A
decade ago, most were in Democratic hands,
with district lines drawn for that party’s
greatest political advantage. But thanks to
their overwhelming win in the battle for state
legislatures in 2010 — 20 chambers switched
from Democratic to GOP majorities that year
— Republicans were able to maximize their
political power, setting district lines to their
benefit. (The failure of Democrats to flip any
legislature this year means that GOP advan-
tage, at least in drawing congressional and
state legislative boundary lines, will extend
through the coming decade — but that’s a
separate problem from the Senate’s setup.)
There’s an analogy here for Democrats
despairing about the Senate. None of their
hopes for altering its imbalance — granting
statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of
Columbia, killing the filibuster, ending con-
servative domination of the federal bench —
can happen unless Democrats first take the
upper chamber, which essentially means
winning the battle on a Republican-tilted
playing field.
But that’s a political problem, not a struc-
tural one. And it’s solvable: Sherrod Brown
(Ohio), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Joe Manchin
(W.Va.) have been elected and reelected; are
they the only Democrats who can win in
without any changes to the Constitution. The
Democrats just have to start winning elec-
tions.
Critics of the unequal nature of the Senate
invariably point to Wyoming and California.
In the chamber, the least-populous state has
the same power as the most populous, one
with 70 times as many residents. But it’s also
true that Vermont has the same power as
Texas, which has 45 times the population;
Delaware has the same clout as Florida, which
has more than 20 times more people. Indeed,
when it comes to partisanship, size doesn’t
matter that much. As I noted in Politico in
2018, the 10 smallest states have 10 Democrats
and 10 Republicans in the Senate. The 10 most
populous states have the same (counting both
of Georgia’s Republicans).
Still, the broader picture is tricky. As Ron
Brownstein summarized it in the Atlantic just
before the election: “The 47 Democratic
senators represent almost 169 million people,
while the 53 Republican senators represent
about 158 million.... The current Democratic
senators won about 14 million more votes
(69 million) than the Republican incumbents
(55 million).” (A victory by either Democrat in
the Georgia runoffs would only exacerbate
that split.) The coming changes in population,
with more populous states growing faster
than smaller ones, will further strengthen
minority rule in the Senate.
What’s to be done about this? In a structur-
al sense, nothing. This was the bargain that
smaller states demanded as the price ofSENATE FROM B1Two senators
per state isn’t
the Democrats’
biggest problem
N ixon’s presidential
limousine on
display, above, at
the library in 2005.
For years the
library, in Yorba
Linda, Calif.,
operated as a
private entity,
designed to
rehabilitate his
image.union. The framers from the big states, like
Virginia’s James Madison, fought the idea
furiously, but in the end, the Vermonts and
Delawares had their way. Surely, though, the
framers could not have imagined how large
the disparities among the states would grow.
Back in 1789, Virginia had roughly 12 times
the population of Rhode Island. Wouldn’t they
have had something to say about today’s
yawning gap between California and Wyo-
ming?
In fact, they did. In Article V, they set down
the process to amend the Constitution, but
with a specific limit on what could be
changed: “No state, without its consent, shall
be deprived of its equal suffrage in the
Senate.” It would be constitutionally possible
(if politically challenging) to establish a state
religion, abolish the Supreme Court, national-
ize social media or create titles of nobility. Two
Senate seats per state is the only unamend-
able feature of the Constitution, because no
state would ever acquiesce to a reduction in
power.
But if the Senate’s small-state bias is locked
in, that doesn’t mean the upper chamber is
destined to remain a GOP bastion. This year,
Republicans minimized their potential losses
in the Senate by winning every seat in states
that went for President Trump, probablyAL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Sen. Kamala Harris
(D-Calif.), the vice
president-elect,
arrives at the
Capitol for a vote
Tuesday. Democrats
failed to win
control of the
Senate in this year’s
election, prompting
some to call its
structure unfair.“world-class museum and public gathering
space.” But it will not be a presidential
library, because it will not host any presiden-
tial records. Thus freed from federal over-
sight, it will be able to tell the story that
Obama chooses — just as Nixon’s private
library did. The former president’s records
will be made available instead through the
“Barack Obama Presidential Library” run by
the National Archives that will be available
only online. (Many of the records are already
digital.)
There are reasons to regret splitting the
records from the presidential center.
Obama’s precedent gives a green light to a
Trump center that could be entirely private
and free from pressure to ever tame itself
even temporarily, as Nixon’s library eventual-
ly did. Either way, the road is clear for Trump
to raise tremendous sums to burnish his
reputation. George W. Bush’s foundation has
more than $400 million in assets; Trump
could probably raise even more from deep-
pocketed supporters, small-dollar donors
and even foreign governments. (In early
2019, Trump’s future chief of staff, then a
congressman, strongly endorsed the Presi-
dential Library Donation Reform Act, which
passed the House but didn’t become law, on
the grounds that it would provide transpar-
ency in a system vulnerable to abuse.)
With a big war chest, the hallowed “perma-
nent campaign” of the modern presidency
could achieve its final form in a foundation
dedicated to burnishing Trump’s record.
Such a foundation could easily generate
enough revenue to support endless functions
at Trump resorts, hotels and Mar-a-Lago. It
could even prove a launchpad for political
careers for the next generation of Trumps —
or, given that the president would still be in
his 70s, for Trump to pull a Grover Cleveland-
esque comeback himself.
There are other problems facing the presi-
dential library system. A culture of accommo-
dating presidential interests rather than
insisting on nonpartisanship is one (as a
small agency, the National Archives lacks the
clout to stand up to former presidents or
their families’ pressures on Capitol Hill).
Stagnant budgets and atrocious agency mo-
rale are others.
The cost to the public’s understanding of
history is real, not least because it now takes
decades to fully process and release contem-
porary presidential records. A 2019 National
Archives memorandum reported that the
George W. Bush library had a backlog of
158 million pages and could process only
650,000 pages per year (a theoretical holdup
of more than 240 years). And since presidents
can restrict access to their most sensitive
materials for up to 12 years, there’s a good
chance that no substantial records will come
out during Trump’s lifetime.
These issues could be fixed. Congress and
a new president could boost funding for the
National Archives to speed records process-
ing. The PRA could be amended to extend,
for Trump, the protections and priorities
applied to Nixon’s papers. And a new
president could stand behind a National
Archives that insists on historical integrity
as the first and only goal for not only
presidential materials but the museums in
presidential sites as well.
But it seems at least as likely that none of
this will happen. Hardly anyone except some
academics and scattered reformers seems
bothered by how the presidential library
system has devolved over the past seven
decades. If Trump figures out yet another way
to turn some aspect of the presidency to his
personal advantage, well, that’s not a devia-
tion — it would be, to paraphrase the
president, just modern-day ex-presidential.
Twitter: @profmusgravePaul Musgrave is an assistant professor of
political science at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.history first. That included installing a new
Watergate exhibit to replace the original one,
which described the scandal as a “coup”
launched by Nixon’s rivals.
The foundation ultimately conceded, and
the records moved to Yorba Linda in 2007. A
new, honest Watergate exhibit was installed.
And, for a time, the federal Nixon library
showed that the National Archives could
design and maintain a presidential library
that lived up to a high standard, even when
there was substantial political pressure to
treat Nixon like any other president — one
who should be allowed to tell his own story.
To be sure, other libraries have since
showed similar glimmers of what such a
system could look like, such as the FDR
library’s recent exhibit on Roosevelt’s intern-
ment of Japanese Americans. But the Nixon
library was supposed to be the test case: If theNational Archives couldn’t tell the ugly story
of a dirty president from whom Congress had
seized the records of his “abuses of govern-
mental power” (as the Presidential Record-
ings and Materials Preservation Act terms his
wrongdoing), then critics who claimed that
libraries were just propaganda fronts would
be vindicated.
The arc of presidential libraries bends
toward loyalty, not truth. After Naftali left,
the Nixon foundation blocked his replace-
ment, because it disagreed with the nomi-
nee’s critical views about the Vietnam War.
After a years-long impasse, a new director
was named — a fine officeholder but one with
no historical expertise who has described
Nixon as “a good man who accomplished
many things.” Even a fully federal institution
cannot be relied upon to give a nonpartisan
account of history to the public — a prec-
edent Trump’s acolytes are surely watching.I
f even Nixon can become normal through
the presidential library system, then it’s
unlikely that the system will do anything
but embrace Trump and let him tell the story
he wants to tell — if he chooses to have a
federal library at all.
The Obama Presidential Center’s website
bills the not-yet-completed facility as aprivate library at his birthplace in Yorba
Linda, Calif. Unlike the other presidential
libraries, this one was not intended to hold
official papers, because the Presidential Re-
cordings and Materials Preservation Act
specifically forbade Nixon’s materials from
leaving the D.C. area.
In other words, the “library” Nixon built
for himself wasn’t a library at all. It was a
redoubt from which he could oversee the last
act of his campaign to restore his image as a
statesman. That project’s apogee came dur-
ing the former president’s funeral at the
library in 1994, when President Bill Clinton
delivered a cloying eulogy that bade farewell
to the deceased “on behalf of a grateful
nation.” Trump could hardly find a better
model for how to use a post-presidential
complex as a legacy-enhancing project.
Nor, it turned out, did the Nixon library’s
ability to tell its story rely on being private.
After Nixon’s death, his family and founda-
tion sought to remove the asterisk from their
private library by having it become part of the
federal system, including a lobbying effort to
have the law changed to enable Nixon’s
records to be transferred to Yorba Linda. But
the National Archives didn’t want the materi-
als going to an institution that wouldn’t
respect the standards of history and histori-
cal record-keeping.
I was in my first real job, working for the
National Archives’ Nixon team in 2006, so I
saw the negotiations over accepting a private
library into the federal system firsthand. The
government-appointed director — my boss,
the historian Timothy Naftali — insisted that
any federal institution would have to putbrary is one place where all presidents are
consistent. Following a trail blazed most
successfully by Richard Nixon, turning his
presidential library into an image-making
prop will be among the most normal things
Trump ever does.F
or most of American history, presidents’
official papers were considered to be
their private property. When they left
office, they took their records with them. This
practice ran obvious risks. Some records
succumbed to neglect. George Washington’s
nephew Bushrod regretted that the presi-
dent’s papers had been “excessively mutilat-
ed by Rats.” Others met more dramatic fates,
as when many of the papers of Southern
presidents John Tyler and Zachary Taylor
were destroyed when their family homes
were looted by Union troops during the Civil
War. And still others were disposed of by
image-minded presidents who worried that
history would be unkind to them, as with the
papers of Chester Arthur and Calvin
Coolidge.
The papers’ value enticed some heirs to
profit from them. George Washington’s heir
sold the first president’s records back to the
government for $25,000 (more than
$600,000 today) in the 1830s. An octogenari-
an — and impoverished — Dolley Madison
sold many of the papers of her husband,
President James Madison, to Congress for the
same amount in 1848.
But Roosevelt recognized that historians
could not reach useful judgments about the
past with only partial access to it. He created
the first modern presidential library by
giving the federal government his papers —
along with his books, his model ship collec-
tion and a complex built with $400, 000
($7.2 million today) in private donations. The
move recast expectations that later presi-
dents would treat their records as a part of
their civic responsibility, the law professor
Jonathan Turley has argued. Future presi-
dents followed FDR’s example by raising
funds to build libraries and deeding their
papers to the National Archives, a framework
codified in the Presidential Libraries Act of- And because presidents could, if they
chose, attach conditions on when some
materials would be released, they retained a
measure of control over their image. The
Kennedy family, for instance, reportedly
slowed access to the president’s taped con-
versations.
This cozy arrangement was never quite as
altruistic as advertised. But it set expecta-
tions that lasted until Nixon undermined
confidence that presidents could be entrust-
ed with their materials. After resigning to
avoid impeachment in the Watergate scan-
dal, Nixon demanded custody of his presi-
dential records — including the infamous
Oval Office tapes, many hundreds of hours of
which had not yet been made public and
which Nixon could have destroyed at will.
After all, they belonged to him.
In response, Congress passed a tough law,
the Presidential Recordings and Materials
Preservation Act, in 1974; it applied only to
Nixon and seized control of his papers.
Congress later codified the new understand-
ing in the Presidential Records Act (PRA),
which applied to presidents from Ronald
Reagan onward and formalized the concept
of presidential libraries as repositories of
records that belonged to the public.
But in doing so, Congress unintentionally
legitimized all the precedents that Nixon
hadn’t broken. And over time, those prec-
edents would render FDR’s vision all but
forgotten, ripe for exploitation by someone
like Trump who has no use for norms.
Ironically, it was Nixon who ended up
proving that a “presidential library” didn’t
really need records to be part of a rehabilita-
tion effort. In 1990, Nixon opened an entirely
LIBRARY FROM B1Trump’s mythmakers can lionize him with ‘alternative facts’
DAMIAN DOVARGANES/ASSOCIATED PRESSDAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES
A visitor to Richard
Nixon’s presidential
library in 2002,
top, looks at the
Watergate exhibit,
which at that time
described the
scandal as a “coup”
against the
president.The arc of presidential libraries
bends toward loyalty, not truth.