Country Wisdom: White House vs. Fox

Campaign attacks on Barack Obama and his crew as latte-drinking elitists are finally coming into play in their war of words with Rupert Murdoch's rough-and-ready outback minions.

Any country boy could have told them a basic rule of rural life: Never get into a pissing contest with a skunk.

Now, the Administration is finding itself befouled by controversy as an ABC correspondent asks at a briefing why "one of our sister organizations" was excluded from a round of official interviews and a moderate House Democrat calls the feud "a mistake...beneath the White House to get into a tit for tat with news organizations.”

The President himself, after pointedly meeting with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and other sympathetic souls, goes public on NBC. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he observes. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”

Historically, that's a distinction the American people have always reserved the right to make for themselves. Back in the late 1960s, Richard Nixon unleashed his Vice President Spiro Agnew to attack the unfriendly media.

Agnew, who later resigned in disgrace for taking bribes, pelted them with alliterative epithets--"pusillanimous pussyfooters," "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals," phrases coined by the recently deceased William Safire who later morphed into a respected New York Times columnist and Pat Buchanan, who is still pontificating for MSNBC.

Those attacks brought a backlash. Although I spent an evening with Mike Wallace and other journalists privately questioning our own fairness, the White House intrusion into that debate only brought public disapproval and recruited more media members for what Nixon would call his Enemies List.

The lesson here for the Obama people seems simple enough: Call out Fox's commentators for their lies and distortion, but don't try to neuter the network as a news organization. In city or country contests, that's not a winning strategy.

Those Titillating Republicans

In all the hooha between Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, the GOP is overlooking the fact that, by long tradition, John McCain is the titular head of their party.

That precept struck me in 1964 during a long conversation with former President Eisenhower. Discussing various issues, he clearly could not bring himself to mention Richard Nixon by name but kept calling him "the titular head of the party" as their 1960 candidate, even though Ike himself was the most recent Republican to occupy the White House.

This year, Republicans are no more enamored of McCain than Ike was of Nixon back then. Their 2008 candidate was non grata at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, where they also pummeled their 21st century Ike, George W. Bush.

The only prominent national politician who seems to recognize McCain's standing is his former opponent, Barack Obama, who had the Arizonan at his side today as he ordered his administration to conduct a review of how contracts are awarded throughout the government.

At a White House meeting last week, McCain had needled the President about the extravagant cost of new helicopters for the Commander-in-Chief and this week is pressuring him to do something about earmarks in the budget.

While most Republicans are howling in the wilderness with Limbaugh and Steele, John McCain is acting every inch as the titular head of the party, the loyal opposition on substantive issues.

Changing Change: 2008 and 1968

Those years are like bookends to our times, when one period of American life ended and another began.

After Democrats held the White House for 28 out of 36 years, the ground shifted in 1968 and, for 28 of the following 40, Republicans took control.

In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to "Bring Us Together" just as, four decades later, Barack Obama offers "Change."

Back then, Democrats were losing their grip on power after a disastrous war and years of domestic upheaval that were stirring fears about social stability in the face of new ideas about gender, race and conventional morality.

Now the Bush years have discredited the backlash of neo-con politics that brought another miserable military misadventure and the rollback of many hard-won individual rights in the name of keeping us safe from terror.

Once again, American politics are at a turning point and, even in the midst of economic misery, Barack Obama embodies hope for something better than what we have had for a long time.

His freshness and confidence are polar opposites of the qualities with which Nixon ushered in his era of reviving ancient grudges and reacting to the world with paranoia.

Party politics and ideologies aside, in the face of unprecedented challenges, Americans are once again ready for something new and better, and it's possible for even the old and jaded to believe that this time we are going to get it.

Lost Causes on SNL

Sarah Palin, who has yet to Meet the Press or Face the Nation, showed up on Saturday Night Live tonight minutes before Oliver Stone rose from the audience to plug his lost cause, the movie, "W."

The juxtaposition was no more bizarre, or funnier, than Alec Baldwin mistaking Palin for Tina Fey, badmouthing her to her face and, when set straight, ogling the VP candidate and telling her, “You are way hotter in person.”.

There must be something profound to be said about all this confusion of reality and fantasy in today's world, but life hasn't been the same since Richard Nixon appeared on "Laugh-In" endlessly mouthing the show's punch line, "Sock it to me?"

Too Many McCains

He is outdoing the 1960 Richard Nixon, of whom John F. Kennedy said, "It must be hard getting up every morning and having to decide who you're going to be that day."

In a New York Times column today headed "The McCain of the Week," Gail Collins suggests, "Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)"

Aside from the lying attack ads on Barack Obama, the Republican effort to hold onto the Bush White House has deteriorated into wheeling out a new John McCain with every headline, accompanied by a plastic Palin figure nodding and smiling like a 21st century Pat Nixon with a few lines of actual dopey dialogue.

In the past week alone, McCain has morphed from the champion of free enterprise to an angry populist regulator of Wall Street, from a confident believer in the soundness of the economy followed a redefinition of "fundamentals" as the workers, not the complicated stuff of facts and figures.

Are voters with short memories actually buying all this? The polls are beginning to show an Obama rebound from the Palin bounce, but it would be foolish to discount the wisdom of P. T. Barnum in gauging public shrewdness.

Gail Collins notes that since "McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long."

Not to forget Richard Nixon.

Palin Attackers' Crystal Ball

In the first recorded case of political pre-cognition, Sarah Palin is refusing to cooperate in the Troopergate case on the grounds that Obama supporters in the Alaska Legislature are behind the investigation, which began on a bipartisan basis in July, two months before John McCain picked her as his running mate.

The less-than-momentous question of whether the Governor fired the commissioner who refused to fire her former brother-in-law is becoming a more important reflection of how the Vice-Presidential candidate deals with opposition.

There is a touch of Nixonian stonewalling, combined with Joe McCarthy-like smearing of the opposition, in her backers' insistence on turning an accusation of her misbehavior into attacks on those who are trying to get at the truth about what she did or didn't do.

A McCain spokesman said today that Palin will not cooperate with "that investigation so long as it remained tainted and run by partisan individuals who have a predetermined conclusion."

The fascinating question is how and why those nefarious Obama supporters decided to start mistreating her last summer.

Musharraf Does a Nixon

In the face of impeachment, Pervez Musharraf is resigning as president of Pakistan, sounding eerily like Richard Nixon almost 34 years ago to the day.

"I don't want the people of Pakistan to slide deeper and deeper into uncertainty," Musharraf said today. "For the interest of the nation, I have decided to resign as president,"

"I have always tried to do what was best for the nation," Nixon said in August 1974, avowing that "the interest of the nation must always come before any personal considerations."

Nixon left office with the claim, "In the Middle East, 100 million people in the Arab countries, many of whom have considered us their enemy for nearly 20 years, now look on us as their friends. We must continue to build on that friendship so that peace can settle at last over the Middle East and so that the cradle of civilization will not become its grave."

Musharraf departs with the Middle East in turmoil after his milking the US of billions of dollars ostensibly to fight terrorists in Pakistan's border areas but leaving behind a crisis in which more Americans are being killed there now than in Iraq.

He exits with a beleaguered government holding nuclear weapons that are controlled who-knows-how by who-knows-whom, with no assurances that "peace can settle at last over the Middle East" and that "the cradle of civilization will not become its grave."

John Edwards Channels Nixon

In his weekend of "confession," there are echoes of Richard Nixon's ploy of "modified limited hangout" during the Watergate crisis, a strategy of concealing crucial information while appearing to come clean.

It didn't save Nixon's presidency and, from early indications, John Edwards' political career won't survive either.

As the Senate Watergate Committee was closing in on the truth, Nixon ordered John Dean to prepare a report that would mix partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further investigation, a parallel to the World War II tactic of Nazi subs sending debris to the surface to make Allied attackers think they had destroyed their target.

John Edwards' "limited hangout" Friday night consisted of a vague admission of adultery, coupled with denials and evasions about everything from the paternity of Rielle Hunter's child to the money his finance director has been giving her, coupled with his willingness to take a DNA test and have all the facts out in the open.

Now, Ms. Hunter is declining the test, and Edwards' generous friend is asserting the payments are a private matter.

"I have been stripped bare," Edwards said in his statement Friday. Not really, but we know as much as we need to know and the only thing left for him to do is go away--quietly. His tacky affair is no Watergate.

Can Democrats Play Nice?

Wise old heads are urging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to cool it from here to November.

In a New York Times OpEd, George McGovern recalls the nastiness that let Richard Nixon slip between his party's cracks:

"In 1968, we Democrats tipped the election to the Republicans and defeated our able nominee, Hubert Humphrey, by splitting our party wide open over the war in Vietnam.

"That year, after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his staff talked me into running for the nomination and taking over his delegates. At the convention in Chicago, after Vice President Humphrey won the nomination, one of my fellow candidates, Eugene McCarthy, perhaps understandably, refused even to stand next to him on the convention stage in a show of unity. I believe that our party’s divisions cost us our chance to prevent Richard Nixon, who at that time had been out of office for eight years, from ever becoming president."

After today’s West Virginia primary, McGovern suggests that Obama and Clinton make joint visits to the five remaining locales, "agree not to criticize each other," and then attend "a reception where citizens paying $50 a ticket would mingle with the two candidates" to raise money for local and state candidates in the fall elections.

In the Washington Post, veteran columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. proposes Hillary Clinton take on a new role as "a stronger and more independent figure" by not letting supporters corner Obama about handing her the vice-presidency but let him heal the Democratic breach by choosing one of her supporters, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell or Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh.

After her victory lap in West Viriginia tonight, Clinton and Obama will be under a lot more pressure to play nice. It would be heartening to see them do that.

Obama as the New Nixon

Paul Krugman has been on Barack Obama's case for weeks, criticizing him over Social Security and health care, but in today's New York Times, he goes over the line into comparing supporters of the "new Kennedy" to, of all people, the old Nixon.

Ironically, Krugman quotes Adlai Stevenson decrying the effect of Eisenhower's VP in making America “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.”

If anything, for some observers, Obama has evoked Stevenson more than JFK in his thoughtful approach and willingness to credit voters with enough intelligence to go beyond sound-bite slogans. His "Yes, We Can" style has been the polar opposite of Nixon's approach to politics.

But Krugman says "most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration--remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again."

A combination of Nixon and George W. Bush? To quote the Republican phrasemaker of 2008, Mike Huckabee, "If you're getting a lot of flak, you must be over the target."

The Kennedying of Obama: Cautionary Note

In the desperation to be rid of Bush, this has become a year of imagery shorthand. While any Republican with a pulse claims to be another Reagan, Barack Obama is seen as a new JFK.

There are parallels. As Nixon did in 1960, Hillary Clinton is invoking her experience during the eight-year tenure of a popular president. But in both cases, the actual occupant of the Oval Office undermined the chances of his would-be successor.

Eisenhower did nothing as blatant as Bill Clinton's campaign antics but, in trying to help his Vice-President in 1960, he asserted that Nixon played a major role during his terms in office. Asked at a press conference about any piece of advice he had heeded, Eisenhower answered, "If you give me a week, I might think of one."

In that campaign, as Frank Rich reminds us today, neither could Kennedy point to any significant achievement in his brief Senate career, but what he offered was change in a time when Americans were ready but not as desperate as they are now for new, younger leadership.

If anything, in his style and emphasis on rational exploration of every issue, Obama is less like Kennedy than Adlai Stevenson, another figure from Illinois, who lost twice to Eisenhower.

Stevenson, who once defined a politician as "someone who approaches every question with an open mouth," was reluctant, as Obama is now, to offer bumper-sticker solutions on every issue. But Stevenson was up against an American legend, and Obama is offering a poetic vision much like Kennedy's as an alternative to the Clintons' mixed legacy.

As he prepares to collide with them on Super Tuesday, Obama might want to recall something else Stevenson said: “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”

Obama's Checkers Speech

The new politics can take a leaf from the very old tomorrow night at the 21st Democratic debate. Just as Richard Nixon saved his vice-presidential candidacy in 1952 from news of a secret political slush fund, Barack Obama has to explain away Antoin Rezko as an obstacle to his campaign's momentum.

For weeks now, the darker side of the Clinton machine has been hammering him with accusations about the Chicago slumlord, and the Former First Lady herself invoked the dreaded name during the last debate.

Yesterday there was another drip of Rezko bad news as Obama's campaign upped the amount of contributions being given to charity to almost $150,000.

Obama's style precludes maudlin Nixon props like his wife's cloth coat and the family dog, but he would be well-advised to prepare his own one-minute version of the Checkers speech to unload the Rezko albatross.

It isn't enough to pass his patron off, as Obama did at the last debate, as someone for whom he did "a few hours" of legal work. Their association has persisted for years and, now that Rezko will be in the headlines facing federal corruption charges, Obama should get out ahead of the issue with his own mea culpa, particularly about the fixer's role in buying the Obamas' home.

In June 2005, Rezko and Obama bought adjoining properties. The senator paid $1.65 million for a Georgian revival mansion, while Rezko bought an adjacent, undeveloped lot for $625,000. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko $104,500 for a strip of his land.

The presidential candidate expressed regrets over the transactions to the Chicago Sun-Times in 2006: "I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it...(W)hile I tried to pay close attention to the specific requirements of ethical conduct, I misgauged the appearance presented by my purchase of the additional land from Mr. Rezko."

Now he has to tell American voters and take away ammunition for attacks on his character that will keep coming until or unless he does. Nixon showed the way.

Giving Thanks for President Kennedy

For anyone over 50, tomorrow will be not only Thanksgiving but the day JFK died 44 years ago. He has been gone now for almost as long as he lived and, in these days of White House infamy, not nearly as much in the national mind as his antagonist, Richard Nixon, whose all-time low approval ratings have just been eclipsed by George W. Bush.

A few years after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wistfully told me that her husband was being remembered too much for how he died rather than what he had lived for. She was right. It was too soon then for Americans to appreciate what they had lost.

In 1960, I had made an unintentional contribution to Kennedy’s election. After my magazine ran a piece by Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Advice to the Next First Lady,” the producers of the “Tonight” show called me to ask Mrs. Roosevelt if she would appear with Jack Paar. To my surprise, she agreed.

On the way to the studio, I asked Mrs. Roosevelt, who had supported Adlai Stevenson during the convention and been visibly cool to JFK, what made her decide to take part in a talk show. “I want to help elect Senator Kennedy,” she said.

On the “Tonight” show, she did just that, comparing Kennedy to FDR during his first campaign in 1932, inspiring voters and responding to their enthusiasm, and predicted he would make a fine President. In Kennedy’s hairline victory, her testimonial may well have been significant, and he didn't disappoint her.

John F. Kennedy was the last president in memory who was still learning while in office. He admitted mistakes and profited from them.

Despite misgivings, he went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba after being told Americans would be greeted as liberators and withdrew when he realized he had been misled, accepting “sole responsibility” for the fiasco.

As the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he put that lesson to use by overruling “experts” who wanted to bomb or invade Cubs and trusting his own instincts to avoid disaster.

After November 22, 1963 I wrote an editorial attempting to define the deep grief over his shocking death-—that beyond his attractiveness and intelligence, there was the loss of a leader “who was still growing—-in understanding, in skill, in compassion, in commitment."

Today's leading contenders for the Presidency are, for the most part, as cool and rational as Kennedy was when he was running for the office. For all our sakes, we can only hope that whoever wins can attain the stature he did in the thousand days he spent in the White House.

Sorriest Assassin of Them All

This week, when Arthur Bremer was released after 35 years in prison, it barely made the news, another irony in his long, fruitless search for fame by killing someone famous.

If he is of any interest at all, Bremer signifies what happened to insane fame in the television age. Before him, assassins of public figures, from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald, had some political motive, however twisted.

Bremer, totally apolitical, wanted only to be seen on TV. In 1972, he dogged Richard Nixon for days, but the President was well-protected by the Secret Service and Vietnam war protesters got in Bremer's way when he tried to approach him at a rally.

So he settled for white supremacist George Wallace, a former Alabama governor who had run for president as an independent in 1968, even though he, as Bremer noted in his diary, would not be "worth more than 3 minutes on network news."

But even after lowering his sights, Bremer was so inept he was almost caught after accidentally firing a gun in his hotel room and somehow managing to wedge another weapon so deep into his car that it was only recovered after he shot Wallace four times on May 15, 1972, severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him.

As police arrested him, Bremer asked, "How much do you think I'll get for my memoirs?"

What the former busboy got was a sentence of 53 years and total obscurity. He missed one accidental chance for notoriety when Nixon's dirty tricksters tried but failed to plant campaign literature for the 1972 Democratic candidate George McGovern in Bremer's apartment.

Doomed to anonymity, he nonetheless paved the way for Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, and John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1980, as well as providing inspiration for the weird assassin, Travis Bickle, in the movie, "Taxi Driver."

Copycats got semi-famous for doing what he tried to do, and now Arthur Bremer is back out in the world once again, where nobody will know who he is.

Mixed Feelings About the Sixties

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s with Hillary Clinton citing virtues for what she did back then, Barack Obama claiming he is of a new generation above the divisiveness of those days and Tom Brokaw, as usual, writing a book to explain it all.

At her alma mater, Wellesley, this week, Clinton said, "I need your help to make the calls and knock on the doors and talk to your friends and family. That's what I did back in 1968 when a group of my dear friends and I jumped in a car…and would drive from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts for Eugene McCarthy. He was running for president on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. I am running for president on part of a platform of ending the war in Iraq."

In Iowa, Obama is telling voters, "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done. And I think that's what people hunger for."

Politicians hype everything about themselves, including the accident of when they were born, but the 1960s were formative years for today's America, exposing fault lines in our national life that still divide us.

From my ancient perspective, what happened back then goes too deep for glib generalizations and political pandering.

On the one hand, the first generation of Americans not entirely driven to outdo their parents materially turned to moral superiority--about war, race, gender. In the 1950s movie, "The Wild One," biker Marlon Brando, asked what he's rebelling against, answers, "What have you got?"

There was awakening from complacency to challenge injustice and try to create a better society. But there was also self-righteous and self-serving acting out by draft-card burners, culminating in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention where anti-war protesters and delegates, including me, were tear-gassed.

We started the decade with JFK's "Ask what you can do for your country" and ended up with Richard Nixon and his dirty tricksters in the White House.

The culture wars began. People Nixon called "The Silent Majority" were appalled by privileged kids publicly trashing their traditional values at Woodstock and elsewhere, paving the way for Reagan's revival a decade later of the fictional feel-good America he lived in as an actor in 1940s movies.

In looking ahead to 2008, it would be a mistake to overuse the 1960s as a template. America was going through social and political growing pains back then that are not quite parallel to what we face now, but at the same time, there is no virtue in dismissing all that and assuming we can just turn to a blank new page in our history.

If Republicans are living in a nostalgic past, Democrats can't just push ahead to a fantasy future. There are enough questions to answer about what we do now in today's world.

Listening to the People

The man who gave a voice to unheard Americans is speaking up today against illegal listening in on them.

In a New York Times Op Ed, 95-year-old Studs Terkel recounts the history of illegal wiretapping during the Red Scare day of the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s and now the Bush Administration's dismantling of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Terkel became famous for taping and airing conversations that, in his words, "celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd."

In a new memoir, the once-blacklisted liberal compares himself jokingly to Richard Nixon, saying both "could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am," or in his own case, "I tape, therefore they are." Terkel's oral histories brought so-called ordinary Americans into history.

Now he is enraged at an executive branch that listens to them too much against their will and at a Congress "moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a 'get out of jail free card' to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers.

"Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them."

The man who taught us how to listen to America deserves to be heard on a subject he knows well.

Nixon/Frost: Poster Boys for Opportunism

Last night Bill Maher interviewed the ghost of David Frost and brought back a rush of memories about Richard Nixon, the 1970s' president who lied and broke laws with heartfelt sincerity.

Maher deferentially let Frost, with customary sliminess, rewrite the Iraq war into a little misunderstanding in which Americans and British went in willingly, without bothering to mention that up to 2 million people in London and hundreds of thousands in New York and Washington were in the streets protesting before it started.

But Frost, now immortalized in a play and upcoming movie for his post-resignation interviews, is remembered by contemporaries as a perfect match for Nixon, poster boys for smarmy opportunism. Typically, his "hard-hitting" interview with the disgraced President was the result of relentless cajoling.

The James Lipton of his day, Frost snagged unctuous sitdowns with Presidents and Prime Ministers, while earning the scorn of the Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe satirists, who called him the "Bubonic Plagiarist" for stealing their satirical approach to the news in his other incarnation.

For an approximation of Frost at his zenith, imagine a tireless, disingenuous combination of Jon Stewart and Larry King with unlimited ambition and greed.

His counterpart, Nixon, ended in disgrace but Sir David Frost, a multimillionaire and now host on the Al Jazeera English Channel, is still with us, pimping his way through history.

Who's Polarizing Whom?

The Presidential polls keep telling us Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are “polarizing” voters. Even as they widen their leads by more than 2-1, the two front runners are beset by sizable minorities who swear never to vote for them under any circumstances.

Today new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg numbers show the former First Lady “viewed unfavorably by 44% of respondents” and about one-third of GOP voters saying “they would consider supporting a third-party candidate in the general election if the party nominee supported abortion and gay rights.”

But to what extent are Clinton and Giuliani doing the polarizing or taking the heat from an electorate divided by George W. Bush, who ran for President as a “uniter?” Not since Richard Nixon, who promised to “bring us together” in 1968, have Americans been so polarized by an unpopular war and a secretive Administration that considered itself above the law.

After Nixon, voters turned to the bland but ineffectual Jimmy Carter to escape a Presidency that had given them a taste of what oppressive power could do. What are their choices now?

If they find Clinton and Giuliani too “polarizing,” which more neutral candidate will they favor?

Mitt Romney, who is on all sides of every issue and can’t keep straight the difference between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden?

John Edwards, the guy with the sincere smile every girl would bring home to meet her parents who keeps talking a little too much about the virtues of honesty?

Fred Thompson, who can do folksy and comfortable but can’t seem to recall how he feels about anything specific?

Mike Huckabee, the smooth-talking preacher, who might just be selling snake oil on social issues and a placebo for foreign policy?

Or Barack Obama, the nice young man with stars in his eyes who may not have his feet firmly enough on the ground?

With time starting to run out, American voters are going to have to get past the anger built up over the Bush years and make some choices about how well-defined a President they want to clean up the social and political wreckage.

Huckabee, Another Jimmy Carter?

David Brooks of the New York Times has discovered the former Arkansas governor in his column today.

“He is a solid conservative who is both temperamentally and substantively different from the conservatives who have led the country over the past few years,” Brooks writes. “He’s rising in the polls, especially in Iowa. His popularity with the press corps suggests he could catch a free media wave that would put him in the top tier. He deserves to be there.”

Brooks may be right, although there are few signs that the Conservative Establishment is ready to embrace him for qualities that many non-Republicans respect. In the unlikely event that they do, another question arises: Could he be another Jimmy Carter?

In the wake of Nixon’s traumatic tenure, voters turned to a sincere man of faith who promised “I will never lie to you” and then proved to be too naïve to deal with the complexities of international affairs.

Carter floundered during the Mariel boatlift when Castro sent criminals and mental cases to us along with legitimate political refugees, and he was at a loss when Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 70 Americans hostage for more than a year. He ended up puzzling over a “national malaise.”

Now Brooks notes about Huckabee, “His foreign policy thinking is thin. Some of his policy ideas seem to come off the top of his head.”

In the relief to be rid of Bush and escape the likes of Giuliani, Thompson and Romney, it’s possible that Republicans may turn to someone as apparently sane and sensible as Huckabee, but if they do, the rest of us will have to look very closely about what lies under that attractive surface.

Nixon Nostalgia

Dick Cavett, the best celebrity interviewer of the 1970s, just can’t let go of Richard Nixon. On his wonderful New York Times blog, the last three entries have been about the Great Unindicted Co-Conspirator. I know just how he feels.

Cavett's current post recalls seeing Himself in the flesh at a restaurant with his daughter Julie during the Ford Administration.

“I grabbed up two menus,” Cavett writes. “Approaching the famous seated pair from behind, I piped, 'Our specials today include the Yorba Linda soufflé, the Whittier College clam chowder . . .' I invented a few more fictional Nixon-related specials; you get the idea. At least I self-censored any Checkers or Watergate references.”

Nixon was not amused. Nor was he much taken with a Cavett anecdote about the smell of burning paper at a White House dinner interpreted as the infamous Veep Spiro Agnew being in the library.

“Oh, I see,” Nixon finally said with a straight face. “Book burning.”

Years from now, will a retired Jon Stewart be writing on his blog about George Bush not being amused by Dick Cheney jokes?