First-Borns and Nixon
June 28th, 2006A few weeks ago, I said Bush was Richard Nixon Reloaded. Now, in the Washington Post, that message is being echoed.
Let’s give credit where credit is due: Nobody knows how to take the worst political hand imaginable — responsibility for a failing war — and turn it to their own advantage like the Republicans. That was the defining political accomplishment of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. It may yet be the defining political achievement of George W. Bush in Iraq. Nixon, of course, had an easier time of it. When he took office in 1969, he inherited a war that his Democratic predecessors had made and that had long since descended into a blood-drenched, stalemated disaster. He could have opted to end the war early in his term, particularly since neither he nor his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed it was winnable. But by continuing the conflict, and even expanding it into Cambodia, he enraged the 40 percent of the nation that wanted us out of Vietnam. Millions of demonstrators took to the streets; some of the student movement embraced a wacky, self-marginalizing anti-Americanism; and mainstream Democrats grew steadily more antiwar.
And by nurturing such deep divisions in the body politic, Nixon created the very kind of political landscape on which he was a master at maneuvering. Just 10 months into his presidency, Nixon was championing what he termed the “silent majority” of his countrymen against the protesting hordes. Democrats railed against the war in Vietnam; Nixon railed against the demonstrators and Democrats, whom he gleefully conflated, at home. It was an asymmetric conflict, and Nixon won it going away, defeating George McGovern in 1972 by more than 20 percentage points.
Today Republicans in general and Karl Rove in particular have resurrected the Nixon game plan. They are not mounting a point-by-point defense of the administration’s plan for Iraq, not least because the administration doesn’t really have a plan for Iraq. When Senate Democrats brought two resolutions to the floor last week, each calling for a change in our policy, the Republicans defeated them both, but they pointedly failed to introduce a resolution of their own affirming the administration’s conduct of the war. That, they understood, would have been a loser in the court of public opinion. Instead, they walked a tightrope: not really defending the war per se but attacking the Democrats for seeking to end it. This was Nixonism of the highest order.
It’s an interesting parallel, and now that I think of it more, it runs a tad deeper than just language, than a love for domestic wiretapping. I think it’s all-too-painfully-possible that Bush simply has no clue what to do in Iraq anymore, and, you know, I’d buy that about our Nixonian President, and his political party, since they want to do such hackneyed things as “condemn” the New York Times for publishing a story using an official Congressional resolution to bring shame upon their house.
Why don’t we just start marking the homes of editors and take their first-borns whenever they step out of line? It sure would save us the trouble of dealing with freedom of speech.