VDH and Me
Two complementary articles about presidential coups that might be illuminating to read side by side. Victor Davis Hanson has just published this gem, Autopsy of a Dead Coup, well worth reading in full. It names names and is clear about dates. My own piece was written back in the first week of January when there was a momentary flurry of impeachment ecstasy about some faux news story that reigned unchecked in the MSM for a day or two. The beginning of Nixon’s Watergate Downfall is reproduced below. The rest is at Deerhound Diary. This is not a new game the Dems are playing. But they’re upping the ante even as they’re lowering their standards to a banana republic level. My opening paragraphs:
Rip<<When have we seen a presidential coup before?
History can be instructive, regardless of how passé (or rewritten) it has become. Much foam-specked spewing beginning anew yesterday about the word illustrated below. The oldest and wisest historians among us can remember all the way back to the bitter end of the 20th century (Phew!) when President Clinton was almost undone by evil Republican clingers obsessed with sex. They don’t find many useful lessons in that exercise, or at least they haven’t learned any that might be available. Worst of all from the consensus elite perspective is the fact that the Clinton Senate trial failed to remove him from office or even significantly decrease his approval rating. Nothing to see here. Move along…
There have been two Senate trials of presidents in American history. And two survivors. Why I’m going to resurrect an even more ancient piece of history that really does contain a few vital learning points. President Richard M. Nixon was re-elected in the Year 1972 (I know! Egad!) by an absolute tidal wave of electoral and popular votes. Nixon received more than 60 percent of votes cast and 520 in the electoral college. McGovern won Massachusetts for a grand total of 17 electoral votes.
The Democrat Party was in a state of devastation. It had been flattened by… itself. McGovern was a far left candidate who seemed opposed not only to the Vietnam War but on account of that war opposed to much of American political tradition, claiming the mantle of a loud counterculture to be the next nation-changing incarnation of FDR. Economic times were tough. All his policy prescriptions added up to making government bigger, more expensive, and more humble on the world stage. The voters didn’t particularly like or dislike him personally. They didn’t particularly like Nixon either; they just preferred his policies to McGovern’s. (Something for Dems to remember now: disliking or disapproving of the President is not the same as not voting for him. Such polls mean little.)
The interval from November 1972 to August 1974 was 22 months. That’s how much time it took to bring Nixon down and eliminate the Republican Party as a political force for 6 years.
Am I daring to suggest that Watergate was a Democrat political operation? (“Do I dare to eat a peach?”) Yes. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious. It was a successful presidential coup. Of all Republicans in the politics of the time, Nixon was the most hated. And hated is the right word, dating back to his days in Congress as a leader of the House Un-American Activities Committee responsible for, among other things, exposing and convicting Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. When Nixon was running for Vice President, press stories suggested he was on the take. He saved himself by going on TV and enduring the humiliation of explaining that his wife wore a cloth coat and that they’d acquired the cocker spaniel puppy Checkers fair and square, with their own money.
No long recitation needed of his depiction in media through the years by a left-leaning press (yes, even then, kiddies) who continued at every opportunity to float the fantasy that Hiss and the executed Rosenburgs were in fact innocent of nuclear espionage as Soviet spies. Nixon narrowly lost his bid for the presidency after two blameless terms as VP for a very popular president. He subsequently lost a run for governor of California and after a nasty campaign bade farewell to the press — and ostensibly public life — with the words, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.” They thought they’d crushed him for good.
But Nixon returned. An unlikely comeback story. He beat a pitiable candidate, Hubert Humphrey, by a nose in 1968, actually began the long demanded drawdown of American troops in Vietnam, stabilized the economy without rocking the boat too much, opened a shockingly unexpected new dialogue with Red China, and hugged Sammy Davis, Jr. at the White House. Then came the ’72 election, a doubly cruel humiliation for the Democrats in government and media. First, the appalling enormity of the defeat itself. Second, the truly poisonous fact that the architect of Democrat ruin was Richard Nixon.
He had to be taken out.
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