NYT/Rich: Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used to Be
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- Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:11:48 -0700
The New York Times
June 3, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used to Be
By FRANK RICH
A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I
shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.
That's in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win
a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in "Frost/Nixon" next Sunday
while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. "Frost/
Nixon," a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president's
1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash
Nixon's record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the
old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever
hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it's hard to resist
a thought experiment the moment you've left the theater: will it
someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?
Perhaps not. It's hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too
slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching
Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He
lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his
tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too
keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed
biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-
righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he's inflicted at
home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president
than Nixon - some already have - at the personal level his is not a
grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella's
talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew
McConaughey's).
This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere
in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut
check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek
poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his
"presidency was over." This flat-lining administration inspires
contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion
whipped up by Nixon; voters just can't wait for Mr. Bush to leave
Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start
rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon's larger-than-life
villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way
they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the
nation.
The rage is already omnipresent, and it's bipartisan. The last New
York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans
felt their country was "seriously off on the wrong track," the highest
figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing
(and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties' two angry bases.
Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles
that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.
On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress's
failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in
Iraq. After it sent Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-
withdrawal deadlines 10 days ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill,
and not just from bloggers. John Edwards, once one of the more
bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war ("I believe that the
risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action," he thundered
on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally bellicose
toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending the
president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed "again and again" so that
Mr. Bush would be forced to realize "he has no choice" but to end the
war. It's not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could
accomplish this feat when the president's obstinacy knows no bounds
and the Democrats' lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses
no threat to his truculence.
Among Republicans the right's revolt against the Bush-endorsed
immigration bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from
rational debate about complex policy questions to plain old nativism,
reminiscent of the 19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base's
traditional gripes - knee-jerk wailing about the "tragedy" of Mary
Cheney's baby - can't be heard above the din.
"White America is in flight" is how Pat Buchanan sounds the
immigration alarm. "All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay
the fine with a credit card" is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill's
punitive measures for illegal immigrants. Bill O'Reilly, while
"reluctantly" supporting Mr. Bush's plan, illustrates how immigration
is "drastically" altering the country by pointing out that America is
"now one-third minority." (Do Jews make the cut?) The rupture is so
deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the bill, is
challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal
editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like "Fight Club."
What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common
is a conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if
they don't adhere to their bases' strict ideological orders. "If
Democrats do not stick to their guns on Iraq," a blogger at
TalkLeft.com warns, there will be "serious political consequences in
2008." In an echo of his ideological opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the
immigration bill the "Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act."
But there's a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-
Bush rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus
among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The
same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed
agreement on much else. Sixty-one percent believe that we should have
stayed out of Iraq, and 63 percent believe we should withdraw by 2008.
Majorities above 60 percent also buy broad provisions of the
immigration bill - including the 66 percent of Republicans (versus 72
percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a guest-worker
program.
What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how
gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base
hollers, America is not going to round up and deport 12 million
illegal immigrants, or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the
Mexican border - despite Lou Dobbs's hoax blaming immigrants for a
nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new president unburdened by a
disastrous war may well fashion the immigration compromise that is
likely to elude Mr. Bush.
Withdrawal from Iraq is also on its way. Contrary to Mr. Edwards, only
Republicans in Congress can overcome presidential vetoes and in so
doing force Mr. Bush's hand on the war. As the bottom drops out of
Iraq and the polls, those G.O.P. votes are starting to line up. The
latest example came last Sunday, when the most hawkish of former
Rumsfeld worshipers, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined his
party's Congressional leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, in
talking about drawing down troops if something "extraordinary" doesn't
happen in Iraq by the time Gen. David Petraeus gives his September
report on the "surge." No doubt Mr. Sessions, who is up for re-
election in 2008, saw a May 12 survey in The Birmingham News showing
that even in his reddest of states, nearly half the voters want
America out of Iraq within a year and favor candidates who agree.
This relatively unified America can't be compared with that of the
second Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals
of the late 1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may
be a precise political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed
presidencies rent by catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by
anger itself and are praying for the mood pendulum to swing.
Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when he described
himself as a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was (to a
fault, as it turned out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see
this equation at work now in Mitt Romney's unflappable game-show-host
persona, in John McCain's unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan
grin and in the unlikely spectacle of Rudy Giuliani trading in his
congenital scowl for a sunny disposition. Hillary Clinton's camp is
doing everything it can to deflect new books reminding voters of the
vicious Washington warfare during her husband's presidency. Then
again, even Michael Moore is rolling out a kinder, gentler persona in
his media blitz for his first film since "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In
this climate, it's hardly happenstance that many Republicans are
looking in desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly
welcomed his candidacy last week because, in his view, Mr. Thompson is
"less harsh" in tone than his often ideologically indistinguishable
rivals and "a real-life version of the avuncular fictional D.A. he
plays on TV." The Democratic boomlet for Barack Obama is the flip side
of the same coin: his views don't differ radically from those of most
of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality is the essence of
calm, the antithesis of anger.
If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly
villainous as Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe
even a used Hoover would do this time.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/opinion/03rich.html
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