Is Sarah Palin In Or Out Of The Picture?

4 Responses to “Is Sarah Palin In Or Out Of The Picture?”

1. MK on July 11th, 2009 4:58 am

   Stone’s take on RN is fascinating for what is missing, the end of the Nixon story – Watergate — and why it played out as he did. I would like to have seen more thoughtful discussion of the correlation between core values, inherent dignity and ethics, the characteristics that govern conduct, and what the public senses. Rather than the blame shifting one hears over and over again in the political world. Stone writes that Richard Nixon. . . in 1962 “got fed up with being called Tricky Dick, got fed up with being the man that nobody would buy a used car from, and fed up by the constant assault on his values and his middle-class background by the liberal media,” he says.

   “So . . . –– he quit politics. Six years later he was inaugurated as President of the United States.” Stone explains that “only in the 1968 campaign and in the confines of a controlled television environment with the genius of Roger Ailes as producer was Nixon able to remake and repackage his image. It was then that Nixon was able to take shed the rough images and bury a reputation he gained as a political assassin.”

   But look at how it all ended, in disaster. One has to wonder what might have happened, if RN reflected more than he appeared to do during the early 1960s on why his public image was what it was. Stone misses a key point – the need to stay centered, to realistically assess how and why you are perceived as you are, and to have a moral compass that serves you well, even in a difficult environment. Millions of U.S. citizens – many in the middle classes — do that every day. Stone doesn’t tackle that issue, unfortunately.

   But wouldn’t RN would have benefited from effort in that area — as well as re-packaging? At heart, there had to be something worth selling to package. With all his talents, think of what a President RN would have been, had he been able to perform the necessary self assessment, rather than to wallow in resentments against the “Northeastern establishment,” against the news media, against the Kennedys, against the professoriate, to the extent he did?

   I fundamentally reject Stone’s view that what happened to RN in 1962 (and as others have written, in 1974) was the fault of the media. RN had much more control of his public image and his private actions than Stone implies. What he was about came through in his speeches and his interviews and in his conduct as well as in news stories about his campaign activities, going back to the earliest days. There were times in the 1950s when RN played the hatchet man (as Agnew later did for him) but when you do that, you have to be prepared to live with the consequences.

   RN viewed politics as a rough and often dirty profession, one where you do unto others before they do unto you. (The narrow defeat in 1960 may have had long term consequences, deepening his sense of how the game is played.) But in the end, it was up to the citizens he sought to govern to assess what he did and why. Certainly, newspapers can pick and choose what stories they run, but the media RN faced wasn’t the all powerful monster that Stone implies. To blame it as a filter is to lean too much on a crutch of a type most Americans do not use in their daily lives. Overdoing use of such crutches can backfire. In the end, it did for RN.

   These days we call facing up to one’s choices manning up. Most ordinary Americans have jobs where performance is judged by outcomes or products. When they go in for their annual performance reviews, they discuss how their past performance fit in with the corporation’s sales targets and marketing goals or the organization’s strategic plan, its goals and objectives. Although most offices have some bullies or witches or windbags, to use the terms in the piece by Camille Paglia which Frank Gannon seemed to admire, they never are mentioned during individual’s performance reviews. One faces one’s boss alone and stands on one’s performance.

   Granted, some writers, such as Peggy Noonan, have expressed doubts about the ease with which younger people are capable of self-reflection. She noted in her column in the Wall Street Journal that “For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.” I wouldn’t hang an entire generation with such a broad brush characterization. But, setting aside party identification and ideological stances, I’m not convinced younger voters don’t sense core values in a politician. David Brooks writes this past week in the NYT that “it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.”

   All of this makes me wonder what RN might have been able to accomplish, had his administration not been so drawn into or tempted by reliance on “abuses of governmental power,” actions fundamentally lacking in dignity and respect for the electorate.

2. MK on July 11th, 2009 9:38 am

   A few more observations on RN, Agnew, and the small part of Peggy Noonan’s current “A Farewell to Harms” essay in the WSJ which refers to self esteem and different generations.

   My late sister observed while she still worked in the private sector in the 1980s that some students she and her peers encountered seemed to expect high paying, satisfying jobs from the moment they graduated. It wasn’t like that in RN’s youth, when he formed his views of strivers. In web posted articles, I’ve seen observations by some management “experts” who specialize in generational conflict in the workplace which point to some expectation gaps. Much of what they describe is anecdotal and consequently difficulty to assess. I’m generally leery of broad brush characterizations, for a number of reasons. But I do wonder sometimes whether as many younger people value resilience and patience and perseverance as many older ones once did and some do.

   As a Baby Boomer, I look at some of this through the filter of my particular generation. A lot has changed since 1962. Stone didn’t mention any of that in his essay. I’m not a sociologist so I can’t unravel the causes of all the changes that have occurred during the last 30 years. But I do think we live with the baggage of some choices made during the 1960s and 1970s by both the left and the right. Those of the left tend to be discussed (see: culture wars) more so than those of the right.

   As I’ve noted here recently, I’ve come to wonder at the longterm effect of Vice President Agnew’s comments about the media and the “elites.” If I could go back in time with my adult perspective, rather than the one I had as an undergraduate Nixon supporter, I still would vote for RN in 1972. But I would tell Agnew — “Dude, if the public increasingly sees the situation with the Vietnam War as an epic fail, it isn’t because of Walter Cronkite or CBS or Harvard professors. We have a robust democracy here, the media is in the mix, just deal.”

   It’s not just the left that affected public discourse and changing values and perceptions. Did the repeated, underlying message of blame in Agnew’s speeches — a comfortable blanket of reassuring explanations in which some of Nixon’s supporters could wrap themselves — play a part in later creating more of a “no fault” culture than existed on the past? Would we have ended up with a political culture that encouraged and rewarded greater resilience, accountability, and responsibility more than it does, without the Vietnam War? Probably not, politics always having been somewhat dependent on finger pointing and demonizing people. But perhaps there would have been less polarization, who knows.

3. MK on July 12th, 2009 7:00 am

   In re-reading this, I see that I used “no fault” where I meant “no responsibility.” No-fault implies things just happen, blame is not assigned. Politics often is quite the opposite. If you look at public discourse over the last few decades, especially on cable and on talk radio, a lot of it reflects efforts to assign blame and dodge responsibility. I do not know whether a different response to handling dissent during RN’s term, and earlier during LBJ’s term, would have affected discourse in the long run. While there were extreme and frightening elements in the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration missed an opportunity to understand the diverse elements involved in the turmoil. It put too much effort into largely fruitless efforts to identify communist front groups. It’s much easier to try to apply a template rather than to figure out what motivates dissenters.

4. Pastor Peter Curtis on July 25th, 2009 1:30 am

   While I am in fact fairly certain that Sarah Palin is far from out of the running to be a future U.S Presidential candidate- I would like to remind observers of the Nixon presidency that Watergate was not the end of Richard Nixon. Yes it tragically caused the end of the thirty seventh presidency, but it was not the end of Nixon’s involvement in the nation’s affairs. Recovering from the deep emotional wounds (not to mention a life-threatening illness) of Watergate, Nixon was consulted by almost all subsequent Presidents on matters of foreign policy especially concerning Russia and China and was advising President Clinton on Russia not long before he died. Nixon recovered from dreadful adversity to serve the nation from behind the scenes for twenty years after Watergate.

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