“The left is the side of the heart as the right is side of the side of the liver,” George Santayana said, laying out the physiology of politics.
Tip O’Neill had the biggest heart in House of Representatives. At 6 foot three 300 pounds, the Speaker of the House who fought Ronald Reagan to a draw embodied tax and spend liberalism. His heart bled your money for widows, orphans, dwarfs, the knock-kneed, the mentally challenged, people in trouble, you or me, pending divorce or accident or death. The waning of our sense of solidarity with the less fortunate, the “we of me,” accounted, O”Neill felt, for the rise of modern conservatism.
The New Deal created the middle class; and the after the 1960’s the middle class said thank you very much, turned on the poor, and embraced the orthodoxy of the liver. We are being politically unfashionable with a giant, Thomas P.” Tip “O’Neill, Paleo-liberal.
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)
Guests:
John Farrell, author of “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century.”