Must-Read: Remembering RMN

If you've forgotten why hated Richard Nixon, go here.

[Oh hell, just go there for the fun of it.]

Designated Kickee

For a blog that doesn't really like to think of itself as all that political, Underbelly has devoted an inordinate amount of ink over the last 10 months to the soon-to-be ex governor of Alaska. And before anybody reminds me, I was quick off the mark with the suggestion that she wouldn't make it to election day.

Well, so I was off by 10 months. So sue me. But do remember this guy:

You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.

For those of you too young to remember: that is November 7, 1962, i.e., six years almost to the day before his election to the Presidency.

Note: I was unable to find an audio clip. Any help on this one?

Update: Here it is! Bruce rescues Buce with two choices--link; or link.

Update to update: Adam Nagourney demolishes the Nixon analogy.

Afterthought: Here's a wrinkle: she didn't resign. She only promised she would resign, a couple of weeks from now. What are the chances of a change of mind? The more I hear of it, the more I think it was an impulse move that she will come to regret.

After-afterthought: By sheer coincidence, I just last night caught Frost/Nixon. Gripping; Frank Langella certainly has changed since Twelve Chairs. And there should be an Academy Award for artificial noses.

The Trouble With Kissinger: He Doesn't Understand Power

Have long thought that one(!) problem with Richard Nixon was that he didn't understand economics--not just that he was "too liberal;" rather, he just wasn't interested, economics didn't make any sense to him and he didn't care. That explains an abomination like Nixon wage-price controls. And also, perhaps more important, why he threw away the Bretton Woods system, basically inviting the Europeans to reach for the lead on world economic issues ("Richard Nixon: Father of the Euro"?).

Now, idling through Kenneth B. Pyle's Japan Rising, my attention is called to an added irony: if Nixon did not understand economics, he had good company. That is: neither did his ally, enabler, co-conspirator Henry Kissinger, Mr. Power himself. As Pye explains, Kissinger never got Japan. And the reason is that Japan was about commerce--economics,-- and Kissinger did not understand that commerce was power.

The reason for [Kissinger's] obliviousness [to the rise of Japan] was that Japanese postwar foreign policy was characterized by economic realism, and Kissinger had little interest in economics as a source of power. National Security Council staff members under Kissinger observed that he had a "profound lack of knowledge and interest in economics" and that discussing economic issues with him was akin to discussing military strategy with the pope. He perceived Japanese diplomats as "not conceptual" in their thinking, lacking long-term vision, and making decisions only by consensus. "The Japanese do no yet think in strategic terms," he told Deng Xiaoping in 1974. "They think in commercial terms." The implication was that pursuing economic advantge was not a means of strategic pursuit of power.

--Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising 15 (2007)

Let's set aside the question of whether the pope understands military strategy. An added irony here is that Kissinger was talking to the one man who understood better than any other that the way forward for China was to set aside ideology and concentrate on, yes, economics

Obama's Hasselhoff Moment

So many bloggers are busy remembering how John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall said "I am a jelly doughnut" (link). Ich bin ein Berliner? Berliner= Jelly doughnut? Well, maybe you had to have been there.

In fact, Kennedy knew he was having trouble with the language. What he really said was "Ich bin ein Berlitzer."

And years later, Richard Nixon went to the Great Wall of China and said "I am a Pekinese."

Well, maybe you had to have been there.

Note: The headline is nothing more than a cheap-shot homage to the man who, by his own account, personally brought down the Berlin Wall. So far as I can tell, no candidate has made any such claim in this campaign. Yet.

How to Lose an Election

Surveying the Clinton csmpaign, Charles Cook (in his email column) attempts to draw some lessons for experience on how to lose an election.

Recent history shows terrific examples of how to handle and how not to handle tough losses.

In the 1994 Maryland governor's race, Democrat Parris Glendening, the county executive for Prince George's County, edged Ellen Sauerbrey, the state House of Delegates Republican leader, by a scant 5,993 votes out of more than 1.4 million cast.

Some Republicans said they smelled foul play, although a subsequent bipartisan investigation found none. Sauerbrey fought and fought, long after it was clear that she would not prevail, earning her the moniker, "Ellen Sourgrapes."

In the 1998 rematch, though Glendening's popularity was on the wane, Sauerbrey's mishandling of the recount likely prevented her from taking advantage of the situation and she lost, 55-45 percent.

In 2006, Republican automobile dealer Vern Buchanan edged out Christine Jennings, a banker and the Democratic nominee in Florida's 13th District, by 369 votes, though the results were clouded by evidence of voting-machine irregularities.

But once again, the candidate on the short end of the stick handled it badly.

This too, might put Jennings at a disadvantage in her rematch effort this fall against Buchanan. A strong Democratic tide might push her over the top, but that's what it would take, as she came across as a sore loser.

The model for how to lose gracefully is South Dakota Sen. John Thune. Then a House member, Thune lost his 2002 challenge to incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson by just 524 votes, with suggestions of voting irregularities on Indian reservations clouding the outcome.

But Thune stepped back, handled the outcome with grace and was able to leverage that into being well positioned to take on Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., just two years later and unseat him.

Instructive stuff. But apparently his reach didn't go back far enough to pick up 1962, when we all learned that we wouldn't have you-know-who to kick around any more:

Back from India (and Black on Nixon)

Okay, so we're back from India, still all befuddled by jet lag and such. But the peculiar blend of diesel fuel, sandalwood and cow poop will be remain in our lungs for a long time, and I assume I'll have something to say about it once I sober up a bit.

Meanwhile, I see my book review of Conrad Black's Nixon biography (from the Phila Inquirer) is up at Phily.com (link).

Barry Goldwater is Messin' With My Head

I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week. I have been absorbed in Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm, his riveting (okay, a bit overlong) account of the 1964 Presidential Campaign—more precisely of the conservative groundswell that culminated in the nomination of Barry Goldwater. It’s triggering lots of long-forgotten memories and stimulating new insights about stuff I never understood in the first place. In the end, I realize I never knew that much about Goldwater in the first place, and I had pretty much forgotten (among others) Nelson Rockefeller, foremost in a long line of paladins sent forth to save the Eastern Establishment—poor Nelson, who never realized that if you are a billionaire, nobody tells you that your shoes squeak.

Perlstein does some of his best stuff with his vignettes of so many now-forgotten figures who did so much to shape the Goldwater phenomenon. Who now remembers (for example) Clarence Manion, the sidewalk contractor’s son, who made himself a one-man conservative agenda-setter and king-maker (his first choice was not Goldwater, but Orval Faubus—and, come to think of it, who remembers Faubus?). Or Steven Shadegg, the one-man political machine, who put Goldwater into the Senate? Or Clif (one “f”) White, who organized the base and virtually single-handed gave Goldwater the nomination—only to be shunted aside by the candidate himself in favor of the homeboys from Arizona? None of them--Manion, nor Shadegg, nor White--has so much as a Wiki entry today.

This shunting-aside calls attention to one of the notable defects in Goldwater’s character—his crashingly poor judgment in people. It was Goldwater himself who dismissed White and Shadegg in favor of, say, Denison Kitchel , who seemed unable to do anything right, and Dean Burch, who didn’t seem to do much of anything at all. It was Goldwater personally who froze out all the counsels of prudence and good politics as he and a small core of true believers crafted the fatal “acceptance speech” that did so much to seal his fate.

Perlstein’s dominant motif is the blindsiding and ultimate disintegration of the “center-left consensus” that was supposed to have carried us beyond ideology. This is good, but it might gain from some historical perspective—I think pretty much the same sort of rebellion carried Napoleon III into power in 1851, and Kerensky out in 1917. The story also adds perspective to the accounts of the procession of boring, tin-eared candidates who have disappointed the Democrats so often in recent years.

I have to admit that I had pretty much forgotten—mercifully, I guess—the wave raw, angry energy that swept through American politics in the early 60s, culminating in the horrific Republican nominating convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in 1964. Most Americans think we live in parlous political times today. I would agree, but I must say that is sobering to reflect that our situation is not really unique. We’ve been here before.

Or in some sense, perhaps, we have been here all along. Most Americans have pretty clearly turned their back on The Incumbent President, but he still clings to his bedrock 33 percent in the polls. How does he do it? I don’t have any glib answer (though I will try to post some tentative thoughts later on). However he does it, we might as well recall that Goldwater never fell any lower—and that his bedrock was, if anything, more angry and assertive than Bush’s base today.

It’s tantalizing to try to compare Goldwater and the Incumbent. I’m not sure it teaches all that much. Goldwater seems to have been, in private matters, a decent and civilized man (he and Rockefeller shared a dislike for Richard Nixon)—The Incumbent has his advocates but on the whole, he seems more given to contention and swagger. There’s plenty of evidence that Goldwater never really wanted to be president—he seems most to have enjoyed flying planes and noodling around with his ham radio. His real skill was serving up to raw meat to the faithful on the rubber chicken circuit—though his campaign speeches were often tedious and off-putting (as a communicator, he wasn’t a patch on Ronald Reagan). The Incumbent appears to have been equally lacking in ambition until someone else put him up to it.

Goldwater and The Incumbent do seem to share some other noteworthy qualities. Apparently both were terrible students, and both seem to have nurtured a profound incuriosity about the great affairs of the Republic they sought to govern (Goldwater may never have read The Conscience of a Conservative, the hugely popular trademark tract that bore his name). But there is one inescapably important difference: The Incumbent made it to the White House; Goldwater went home to Arizona. He's back for the moment, though, messin' with my head.