An overdue break for Andy Jackson idolatry

Have I mentioned lately what a spectacular champion of democracy and American patriotism that Andrew Jackson was?

Historian Sean Wilentz has a new biography of Old Hickory out, Andrew Jackon (2005).   Talking about how it's important to avoid "anachronistic" thinking in evaluating pre-Civil War leaders, Wilentz writes:

All efforts to judge Andrew Jackson by political standards other than his own, and those of his time, are doomed from the start. And by the criteria of the 1830s, Jackson was regarded as a champion of equal rights and democracy, in line with the maxim, delivered in his first annual message, that "the majority is to govern." There were some exceptions, such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who condemned Jackson as a slaveholder and upholder of sinful inequality. The British radical William Cobbett, however, hailed him as "the greatest soldier and greatest statesman, whose name has ever yet appeared upon the records of valour and of wisdom." The Scots-born emigre Frances Wright - a heterodox feminist, freethinker, and antislavery firebrand known as "the Red Harlot of Infidelity" - thought Jackson was "the true saviour of the species." The iconoclastic New York editor William Leggett came to dispute sharply Jackson's stance on slavery, but nevertheless thought him "the leader and champion of the people," who stood "at the head of the Democracy of the world, fighting its battles, and stemming the tide of selfish interest combined with unprincipled ambition." Eminent conservatives saw similar things in Jackson, but with dismay, calling him the foremost advocate of what the learned jurist James Kent denounced as "the democracy of numbers and radicalism."  (my emphasis)

Yeah, that gets it about right.

Which reminds me, I don't care what the silly pollsters say, the real reason Bush's popularity has plummeted is that he stood there in New Orleans just after Katrina and did a nationally-televised speech standing in front of a spotlighted statue of the General right there in Jackson Square in the French Quarter.  That's a real heavy load of karma to take on.  Other members of his party might take a lesson from this:  today's Republicans should never, ever, ever try to use Andrew Jackson as a prop for themselves!  A bad, bad idea.