Bush and Nixon

The outing of Deep Throat has the extreme right in a flurry. After all, Bush/Nixon comparisons are easy, and it's not just the left that knows this. Although Bush has been very careful to surround himself with loyal people (i.e., people who owe him, i.e. people he owns), all it takes is one "bad apple" to foil his attempts to conceal his methods. The left would love to have a new Deep Throat who would bring down Bush's house of cards.

Although Bush would like to equate his presidency with Reagan's, the comparison is weak. Bush is much more a Nixonite. Not just because Rumsfield and Cheney were part of the Nixon team, and not just because Daddy Bush headed the RNC under Nixon, and not just because Karl Rove was trained by the Nixon dirty tricks team--rather it's the pervasive culture of deceit and crookedness and the slimy exploitation of revenge and retribution, comon to both Nixon's and Bush's administrations. Despite the abridging of his past misdeeds with his "born again" claim for a do-over, Baby Bush can't conceal his essential character--his destructive arrogance. In addition, it's the war lies and Bush's attempts to mark his dissenters as anti-American, just as Nixon did. And it's little things, like Bush equating flying the flag with showing your support for the president--associating the flag with the president, rather than the ideals that Americans have died to protect--just as Nixon told us to turn on our porch lights to show support for his policies--both tactics taking advantage of something all Americans do anyway, and using it to conceal the growing discontent with the office holder and how he was dishonoring the office.

The 2004 election reminded me often of the Nixon elections.

The 1968 presidential election was even more emotionally charged than this past one, partly because of candidate Robert Kennedy's assassination and the Vietnam War protests, especially during the Democratic National Convention. The conservative backlash against the civil rights movement got George Wallace 13% of the vote with his pro-segregation campaign and got Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated. What a time that was. The popular vote favored Nixon with a tiny lead, although more than Bush got in 2000 (Nixon led by 1.2 percentage points, while Gore led by 0.5%). Still it was a better return for Nixon than in 1960, when he lost to Kennedy by 0.17 of a percentage point.

But it's the 1972 election that I think about the most these days. Nixon had not managed to end the Vietnam War in his first four years and had expanded the war into Cambodia. So he should have been in trouble for the 1972 election--but he won it with a true landslide: 23 percentage points (in comparison, Bush won reelection by 3 percentage points). The Watergate break-in did not make much of a dent in Nixon's reelection efforts since Nixon denied involvement and used the CIA to slow the investigation, but eventually he had to resign over this obstruction of justice.

After the 1972 reelection, I thought I couldn't stay in the U.S. I didn't care much for McGovern, but I detested Nixon. Still Nixon won, and I stayed in the U.S. Then Nixon was revealed as a conniver and his hubris brought him down. And in 2004 Bush won, and I 'm still in the U.S. It would be pretty to think that another Deep Throat will emerge with evidence of the Bush administration's smoking gun. Because it will be a long four years.