Stay-at-home campaigns may make comeback in pandemic
MENTOR, Ohio — President Donald Trump and Joe Biden are wrestling with how to campaign safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Historians offer up precedent that might come with some lessons: James Garfield let the people come to him.
From the front porch of his Ohio home, the 19thcentury presidential candidate hosted thousands of people on his shady lawn to hear him talk about his plans. His at-home experiment proved successful in 1880. It was copied by Oval Office successors, made famous by William McKinley some 16 years later and left a lasting imprint on presidential politics — all while keeping White House hopefuls relatively safe from disease.
“It’s 1880. They can’t follow him on Twitter or look at his Facebook page or see him on CNN every night,” said Todd Arrington, site manager of the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. “Candidates were expected to basically stay home and really not say anything. So when people started showing up here, Garfield did kind of break the mold.”
The mold has broken again, thanks to the coronavirus, which essentially has frozen traditional campaigning.
Garfield wasn’t necessarily seeking attention when crowds began traveling to his farm, named Lawnfield, in northeast Ohio. The little-known congressman had been selected on the 36th ballot during a disputed convention, and people were curious about the mystery candidate. They started traveling from nearby cities and by train from neighboring states.
Campaigning was seen as a rude and uncivil form of self-promotion at the time, and Garfield was among those who believed “the office should come to the man, not the other way around,” Arrington said.
“At first Garfield really just didn’t know what to do because this was unprecedented,” Arrington said. “People didn’t just show up at a candidate’s house.”
A former Union Army general and college president, Garfield responded by strolling onto his wide front porch and talking to voters. He tailored his remarks to their issues, Arrington said. He spoke of civil rights to African American visitors, of tariffs when it was businessmen. He spoke German to German immigrants and, with female visitors, dodged the suffrage question while praising women’s service during the Civil War.
The events revealed a truth about campaigning.
“The fundamental question of any campaign is how you get people out of their normal routine to participate,” said Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “This is an important mechanism for answering that question. You make it an excursion. You make a day of it, you take a picnic. You get to meet the president himself and see he isn’t just some person in Washington. He’s one of us.”
Unwittingly, this aversion to campaigning may have helped spare politicians from contagious diseases common in the day, including yellow fever, cholera and typhoid.
What Garfield started, other Republicans would emulate and another future Ohio president would perfect. With McKinley’s 1896 campaign, the front-porch campaign became a frontporch strategy. Some 750,000 supporters and spectators visited McKinley’s lawn in Canton, about 70 miles south of Mentor, and full-scale campaign merchandising was born.
BEIJING — China plans to establish a special bureau in Hong Kong to investigate and prosecute crimes considered threatening to national security, the state-run news agency said Saturday, as it reported on details of a controversial new national security law Beijing is imposing on the semi-autonomous territory.
In addition, bodies in all Hong Kong government departments, from finance to immigration, will be directly answerable to the central government in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The announcement is sure to increase concerns that China’s central government will continue to tighten its grip on Hong Kong. Beijing has said it is determined to press ahead with the national security legislation — which has been strongly criticized as undermining the Asian financial hub’s legal and political institutions — despite heavy criticism from within Hong Kong and abroad.
The details of the proposed national security law emerged as the body that handles most lawmaking for China’s top legislative body closed its latest meeting. The bill was raised for discussion at the meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress but there was no further word on its fate, Xinhua said.
Tam Yiu-chung, Hong Kong’s sole delegate on the Standing Committee, reportedly said the law was reviewed but no vote had been taken, and that it wasn’t clear when it would be further vetted. The Standing Committee meets every two months.
The bill was submitted last week for deliberation, covering four categories of crimes: secession, subversion of state power, local terrorist activities and collaborating with foreign or external foreign forces to endanger national security.
The bill has received heavy criticism, including from the U.S., which says it will revoke some of the preferential conditions extended toward Hong Kong after its transfer from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Britain has said it will offer passports and a path to citizenship to as many as 3 million Hong Kong residents. Group of Seven leading economies called on China to reconsider its plans, issuing a joint statement voicing “grave concern” over the legislation that is said would breach Beijing’s international commitments as well as the territory’s constitution.
Beijing has repeatedly denounced the moves as rank interference in its internal affairs.
In its full session last month, the congress ratified a decision to enact such legislation at the national level after Hong Kong’s own Legislative Council was unable to do so because of strong local opposition. Critics say the law could severely limit free speech and opposition political activity.
Legal experts say Beijing’s justifications for the law are debatable.
“It raises the question whether individuals will be tried within the criminal justice system in (Hong Kong) by the Hong Kong courts or sent to the Mainland for trial and serve any terms of imprisonment in Mainland prisons,” the Hong Kong Bar Association said in a statement emailed to reporters.
China acted following widespread and sometimes violent anti-government protests in Hong Kong last year that Beijing saw as a dangerous campaign to split the territory from the rest of the country. Though protests were initially spurred by opposition to proposed legislation that could have seen criminal suspects sent to the mainland for trials in China’s highly opaque legal system, along with possible torture and abuse. The extradition bill was eventually scrapped.
China has sought to assuage concerns by saying the new legislation would only target “acts and activities that severely undermine national security,” according to Xinhua.
The legislation is broadly seen as an additional measure further eroding the legal distinctions between Hong Kong and mainland China.