Dana Blankenhorn

The 1967 Game: Who is Gerald Ford Now?

When we think of Gerald Ford today, we think of the late former President with fondness.

We don't think of what he was in 1967. (That's him to the right. Notice who is applauding him.)

In 1967 Ford was the House Minority Leader. He was a good foot soldier for the cause, albeit a bit stolid. Few people by that time remembered the Michigan center or the male model. He was the gentleman from Grand Rapids, as solid a Republican seat as you could have, comfortable in his own skin and comfortable in Washington, D.C. (This is not an easy trick.)

With the 1966 election in their rear-view mirror, conservatives felt they had, if not a real majority, at least a working majority on a host of issues. By combining the votes of southern Democrats with their own Republican troops, movement conservatives felt, they could at least stop Democratic advances, the War on Poverty, the Great Society, the Civil Rights laws.

But they couldn't. Somehow. Liberal justices like Thurgood Marshall were confirmed. Deficit-laden budgets offering both guns and butter were passed with ease. Ford, conservatives felt, was one of the chief enablers.

He was. By 1967 he had been in the House for nearly 20 years. He had been a member of the majority for just two of those years, under Speaker Joe Martin.  Martin's majority was killed in the anti-McCarthy election of 1954, and Ford learned a lesson from that. Don't challenge Democrats directly. Lean against their assumptions. Moderate them. Be the anti-thesis. It worked for Eisenhower, and Ford became loyal to Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon.

So who's Gerald Ford now?

It's Gonna Get Dark, It's Gonna Get Cold

The title is from Billy Joel's It's All About Soul, and while it has been dark and cold since Billy stopped cranking out the hits, that's not what we're talking about. (Achtung, baby)

The subject is next year, the real crisis of our time, the true gotterdammerung for the conservative movement, the year when the dam breaks and it all goes to hell.

Liberals of a certain age (like Newsweek's Jon Meachum) well recall their own gotterdammerung. Martin died. Bobby died. Chicago. Nixon. Body bags piling up at the airport, bad trips all around.

All this is coming for the Right now. You better start swimming or you will sink like a stone.

This mess in Pakistan is just the appetizer. Afghanistan is likely to be lost, just as Iraq was. Putey-poot won't let you bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. The crisis of global climate change will become more than obvious. There will be no immunity, no statute of limitations.

And that's not the worst of it.

What George W. Bush Has Done

George W. Bush has made me ashamed to be an American, and caused me to become enraged against millions of my fellow citizens.

This is not unusual for a crisis President. When a political thesis, a set of myths and values meant to inform power, becomes obsolete, the government is bound to ignore the reality of its time. It goes on auto-pilot, and does grave damage.

This last happened 40 years ago under Lyndon B. Johnson. World War II vets and their wives came to hate LBJ. They also became enraged against their own children, and the elites which coddled or enabled them. The kids in turn became enraged at the parents. They have lived in shame and reaction ever since.

It also happened at the bottom of the Great Depression, with people hating Hoover and the forces he represented. It happened in the 1890s, with people hating Cleveland and the Money Power he supported. It happened in the 1850s, with people hating Buchanan and the South.

Note, too, that the hate was returned in kind, in all these cases. It's hard to remember now the passion with which rich people hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, the class traitor. Or William McKinley. The hate against Lincoln we know, for history won't forget the Civil War or his assassination.

The point is it happens, it always happens. A crisis breeds hate.

So I hate Bush and all his works. I'm ashamed that my country destroyed the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization, and I'll feel like strangling the next joker who tells me how evil Saddam Hussein was. Same with the one who claims I "hate the troops." I love the troops, it's their commanders I hate. They should suffer, all of them, eternal damnation for what they have done.

Old Media Turns On Itself

One of the telling signs of an imminent crisis is when the old media, defined as the medium which holds the power in politics, begins to turn on itself.

We're seeing that now on cable television, in all its glory. After years of marching in lockstep -- similar formats, similar presentations, even similar positions on issues -- the cable networks have turned on one another with increasing viciousness.

MSNBC, which as the #3 network would be expected to shake things up, is rumored to be going all-left, but more important Keith Olbermann (left) is being given an ever-longer leash and the chance to name names. Perhaps more telling is how CNN is all over the Judith Regan story as well, trying to puzzle out which Fox News executive is "going down" for suborning perjury. (More important they're doing this on-air, not online.)

In behaving this way, of course, both networks are just imitating #1 -- and there's no doubt that Fox is the leader in the ratings. They achieved leadership by essentially running a Talk Radio Network, filled with ego-driven talking heads always anxious to start a fight. People like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, as a result, have become the modern-day equivalent of rock stars, complete with adoring fans, and a feeling of immunity concerning what they say and do.

Or, perhaps, they're the equivalent of AM deejays.

This was, in business terms, brilliant. It targeted the audience, giving Fox exclusive access to a sizable slice of it. And it costs very little money. It costs a heck of a lot less than newsgathering does.

Time to Bury 1968

Newsweek has a big cover story this week about 1968.

I have written here many times about the importance of 1968 in setting America's political course.

It is time we buried 1968.

The average American today was not born in 1968. Why should they have the course of their lives determined by something which happened before they were born?

What are the problems of 1968 to us, that we should continue to be dominated by them? What are the solutions of 1968, that they should remain relevant?

Newsweek calls 1968 "the year that made us who we are." No it didn't. It didn't make me who I am. It didn't make my wife who she is. It's easy to note that Barack Obama was just a first-grader in 1968, but Hillary Clinton had yet to graduate college or meet Bill Clinton, and John Edwards was a teenager.

It is time we buried 1968.

Run Against Nixon

There is a very simple way for Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, to seize the initiative in this coming Presidential election, and put all Obama's current attacks on the 1960s or 1990s in context.

Run against Nixon. Stop blaming Hillary Clinton for the problems of the Democratic Party. Place the blame where it belongs, on Republicans, on Nixon's heirs.

As I have noted here many times, Richard Nixon still dominates American politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt dominated much of the 1960s. The Bush Administration's policies are completely Nixonian, and every single Republican candidate is a Nixonite.

They prefer to be called conservatives or Reaganites. Reagan was the smiley face placed on Nixon's policies in the 1980s. His sunny, optimistic words  hid Ed Meese, Iran-Contra, the LBO scandals, strike-breaking, the anti-environment policies of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch. These were not aberrations of his time. They were the point.

All these assumptions were set in motion by Richard Nixon, and the last 7 years are Nixonism brought to full flower. The paranoid world view, the enemies lists, the ruthlessness, the violence, the corruption, the destruction of the Constitution -- it's all Nixon.

So tie it all together and run against that. Demonstrate how every Republican Presidential candidate is an heir to Nixon, how the George W. Bush Administration has repeated every mistake Nixon ever made, squared, and how the only way toward progress is by rejecting the premises behind these policies as irrelevant.

Time to move on.

This Week's Clue: Let Obama Be Reagan

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 45 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of November 12.

Enjoy.

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Barack Obama got halfway to a Clue this week by saying baby boomer Hillary Clinton can't unite the country.

I say half a Clue because Obama was unable to articulate exactly what the problem is. Clinton was able to easily counter with all the good things about the 1960s, as though he were calling the 1960s the problem. Obama came a little closer to wisdom by then attacking the 1990s.

But the response to this is right out of 1984 -- the year and not the book -- "Where's the Beef?"

Obama is, sad to say, lost without my book. My book? Well, when your subject heading of "political philosophy" approaches a gigabyte of space, I'd say there's a book there.

The problem here isn't the hippies, and it isn't Clinton. It's Nixon. Specifically the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, which the Clintons have been fighting since Nixon's election, the struggle which (fair or not) defines their lives. From Hillary's Alinsky thesis to Bill's draft-dodging, from Hillary's working with the Judiciary Committee during Watergate to Bill's Third Way, they have built their lives creating an AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis.

As with Eisenhower's AntiThesis to the Roosevelt New Deal Thesis, the Clinton Third Way AntiThesis had a period of glory, called the 1990s, during which everything clicked. By moderating the Nixon Thesis, leaning against an opposition Congress, Bill Clinton achieved moderate policies which worked, both domestically and on the international stage. Then his Vice President was robbed much as Eisenhower's had been -- and it was the 1960 decision which is the real father of the 2000 Florida debacle, nothing else.

But, as with Obama's own statements this week, this only gets you halfway to wisdom. Click below to to get the rest of the way there.

Light of Day

One of my favorite parts of the old Law & Order, when Michael Moriarty was playing assistant D.A. Ben Stone, was when he got to force evidence out of some powerful person.

He would call them "sir" in a way that meant "scum," then he'd remind them of his power, mention the idea of hidden secrets in their finances or personal pasts, snap his fingers and say "light of day." At which point some self-serving confession came out, like "I didn't know but what could I do," and the way would be clear to head for court.

At the end of every generational crisis, as the existing Thesis collapses, we come to a similar moment. Light of day. All the secrets are going to be exposed, whether sexual, financial, violent, or simple manipulation.

In the current era they're coming so fast and furious some idiots on the TeeVee think the party in power will get away with it. Well, it's their job to keep the tension going. What, you thought it was their job to get to the truth?

Eisenhower Democrats

It's partly because of our longer life spans that the eerie, BizarroWorld comparisons between our time and 1967 come so easily.

In previous eras, hardly anyone then in public life had any real recollection of the previous crisis. No one who was an important figure in 1967 had much going for them in 1931, and none of the figures of 1931 had been figures in 1895.

It's because that's not entirely true, I think, that we fit into the opposite roles so easily today. And this is no more obviously true than where it comes to Democrats in Washington.

There actually are some Washington Democrats, like John Dingell, Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd, who were in office way back then. Byrd has changed with the times, becoming more liberal and strident. Kennedy and Dingell remain what they were.

But these are a tiny minority. Most of Washington goes on blissfully unaware of past patterns, such as how much today's Democrats sound just like the Eisenhower Republicans of a generation ago.

Thesis, AntiThesis, or Why Clinton Will Win

In every past crisis of America's political history, the new Thesis emerged first from the old AntiThesis.

• Abraham Lincoln was a Whig.
• Theodore Roosevelt was a Mugwump.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Wilsonian Populist.
• Richard Nixon was an Eisenhower Republican.

The AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, as I've written here before, is Bill Clinton's Third Way. The Third Way accepted the legitimacy of the Nixon Thesis and leaned against it, sought to moderate it, while holding liberals at bay. This is precisely what Dwight Eisenhower did for Republicans, he leaned against the Roosevelt Thesis of the New Deal while holding conservatives at bay.

So if history is any guide, our next President will be Hillary Clinton. She was, face it, far more her husband's Vice President than was Al Gore, who has proven himself more of a futurist, a man of the next Thesis, than of the AntiThesis he was serving in the 1990s.