Turning Nixon into Reagan

It’s beginning to look a lot like Nixon.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is feeding the Netroots rhetoric, but everything about her career says that’s all she’ll give them once in power. She is an Anti-Thesis politician, afraid to challenge the Thesis of her time, which is the Nixon Thesis of Conflict.

Everyone in Washington is steeped in that Thesis. There is no one in today’s Washington with memories of another Thesis dominating our lives, specifically the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity. Those days exist only in history books. It’s a time the Washington Establishment venerates as a previous generation venerated the Lost Cause. This should not surprise. We are just as far removed in time from World War II as Leo Frank was from the Civil War. A little further, actually. (If you don’t remember the Leo Frank case, think The Birth of a Nation.)

While those in the Netroots may disagree, there is more they must face down than the legacy of George W. Bush. There is 65 years of history, if you count the period from Pearl Harbor to today as one continuous war, which you should. The habits of a political lifetime are being challenged, and no matter how unpopular the man defending that lifetime, that won’t go down easy.

Here’s a fine example of how hard it will be. Portraying Howard Dean as a failure, as a candidate whom "the country heard and rejected," is precisely what gave the New Right Nixon in 1968, and not Reagan. By portraying Barry Goldwater as a complete failure, rather than as merely a man slightly ahead of his time, the New Right sold itself out — no one else had to do it for them.

The failures of Barack Obama and John Edwards to break through and challenge Clinton’s lead is born of this history.

Edwards is challenging the Thesis directly,
but in so doing is laying himself open to the best defenses of that
thesis. The poor are unqualified to attack us, the Thesis says, and the
rich have no right to, because they have benefited. Limousine Liberal
is what the $400 haircut says, and this is ground that Republicans like
to stand on, ground they feel comfortable on. Republicans also know
how to go after plaintiff’s attorneys, the very words "trial lawyer"
spoken with a sneer. Oh, they want Edwards, the Republicans do. They want him very badly.

Which is why Democrats are unlikely to give him to them. In fact, the problem
with John Edwards is that he is mainly talking about the
past, not the future. He talks about Iraq and health care and Two Americas, but that’s our past and present. Vision is lacking. There is no "shining city on a hill" in his rhetoric, no Roosevelt flourishes on the great future
sitting just beyond this time of sacrifice.

Obama has a similar problem. Every rhetorical move he makes can be
covered by Clinton. And given that his instincts as a politician are
consensual in nature, seeking agreement and building on it rather than
cutting the electoral steak into pieces, as politicians and media
analysts assume must be done, his actions, too, can be covered. There
seems no "there" there. Where’s the beef? Obama wants to be Franklin Roosevelt, but doesn’t know how to get there. You get there by talking about the future, Barack.

I have been writing, for a year now, about the Internet Thesis, about
the myths and values of this time, about where they come from, and
where they should be taking us. But no politician has seized this idea.
I’m just a blogger, an unknown writer in Atlanta, Georgia, an amateur
historian, a minor tech journalist. I’m no one.