Response to Papers by Major, Baldwin, and Bailey: Democratic Statesmanship and the Blue Guitar

Here, McClay comments on Rafael Major, Jeremy D Bailey, and Christopher E Baldwin's essays on Democratic statesmanship and the Blue Guitar. He says the skill of statesmanship is always a tricky, elusive matter--hard to come by, hard to measure, and hard even to define or describe. Abraham Lincoln, the subject of Major's imaginative essay, has been particularly difficult to understand, as a man of extraordinary psychological and moral complexity whose political intentions were sufficiently ambiguous and shifting to cause almost every faction to feel, at some point, that he was against them. Bailey's essay revolves around the ambiguity and inscrutability of James Madison, whose chief act of statesmanship was his shepherding of the drafting and adoption of the 1787 Constitution. Baldwin's essay on Benjamin Franklin shows the crafty old icon to be just as inscrutable as Lincoln and Madison, and perhaps more so.