(STILL in the grip of this wretched virus, so reprinting a post from December 2011.)
It’s
far too early to be making any predictions about next year’s presidential
elections. We don’t know who the Republican nominee will be, we don’t know if
there will be viable candidates from a third or fourth party, and we don’t know
what’s going to happen in the world in the next ten months or so.
With
that qualification, I can’t help looking at what we can see now and being
reminded (given a propensity for glib historical analogies) of two other
elections gone by, where a lot of similar factors were in play.
Barack
Obama took office in the most tumultuous set of circumstances inherited by any
president since Harry Truman, and there are some intriguing comparisons with
Truman in his first term. Like Truman, Obama had to make a lot of tough
decisions right away and pleased almost no one. Like Truman, he saw the
Republicans decisively take over Congress in the mid-term elections. Like
Truman, he has been scorned by many in his party, but unlike Truman he doesn’t
appear to be in any danger of facing extra-party campaigns begun by disgruntled
Democrats.
For
all those problems, plus some economic difficulties (inflation and postwar
scarcity of some items), Truman ran a strong campaign, positioned himself as
the friend of the average American, attacked the “do-nothing Congress,” and stunned
everybody by defeating the excessively stiff New York Governor Thomas Dewey,
who was once described by Dorothy Parker as looking “like the little man on top
of the wedding cake.”
That
brings us to another troubled incumbent and another presidential election.
Richard Nixon was elected president with 43 percent of the vote in an election
where third-party candidate George Wallace polled more than 12 percent. Nixon
was the most personality-deficient president of the television era, and he came
before the voters for re-election in 1972 at a time when the economy was going
through a period of inflationary shakiness.
Nixon
and Obama had some points in common. Like Obama, Nixon came to office
inheriting a huge problem, the Vietnam War, and in four years he had neither
won it nor gotten the country out of it. Like Obama, Nixon was a pragmatic
moderate, whose moderation was appreciated by nether his party nor the
opposition. And like Obama, Nixon drove many people in the opposition party
absolutely out of their senses — bug-eyed, drooling crazy. It was the latter
quality that got him re-elected.
One of the best things in favor of a
candidate is a vulnerable opponent. Many Democrats had become so rabid about
Vietnam by 1972 that their primary criterion for a candidate was that he be as
passionate against the war as they were. They ended up getting Sen. George
McGovern of South Dakota, a smart and decent man who didn’t deserve all his
followers.
Despite
his inability to connect personally with most voters, and despite his failure
to resolve the biggest problem he was handed, Nixon made himself look better by
attacking his opponent. Calling the Democrats the party of acid, amnesty and
abortion, he rode those attacks to victory with nearly 62 percent of the vote.
Truman
and Nixon both showed that an incumbent president of some ability can win
despite problems in his record. They both demonstrated, to differing extents,
the value of having a problematic opponent. Obama is certainly a president of
some ability, with a better record than either his opponents or his own party
give him credit for. And it looks as if he’ll be lucky in his opponent. The
Republicans appear poised to nominate either their own fringe-element darling
or else Mitt Romney, who, come to think of it, reminds you of the little man on
top of the wedding cake.
