The New Nixons
Making Tricky Dick look good
TRICKY Dick is back. Sure, the ghost of President Richard Nixon has been with us in some ways all along — we label every scandal with gate, the mere hint of presidential secrecy earns the “Nixonian” badge — but now he’s everywhere.
Here’s the twist: This time, the comparisons — to President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz — are making Nixon look good.
Nixon’s typically thought to have set some kind of gold standard of presidential perfidy. The truth is, Obama and Clinton make Nixon look like a Boy Scout.
Start with the targeting of conservative and proIsrael taxexempt groups by the Obama IRS in the runup to the 2012 election, after which the agency destroyed evidence and impeded congressional investigation.
The weaponization of a federal agency as an arm of the committee to reelect President Obama earned the “Nixonian” badge from the media, because Nixon tried to have the IRS audit political opponents.
But Nixon’s purpose was mostly revenge. Obama’s IRS silenced political speech during an election year.
Then there was the administration monitoring of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s communications with US Jewish groups opposed to the Iran deal — and with members of Congress.
Nixonian? Sure — on steroids. Nixon in 1973 pushed the increased surveillance of foreign officials and even sanctioned breaking into embassies. But Obama’s NSA was snooping on Congress.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton, whose controlfreak paranoia arguably exceeds the levels that made Nixon famous. Nixon ordered the secret taping of White House conversations — an act of paranoia that ultimately did him in after the Watergate scandal came to light and the tapes produced evidence against him.
Something similar happened with Clinton. As secretary of state, she not only exclusively used a private email address but even set up a “homebrew” server at her house, putting her in total control of her communication ar chives — as evidenced by the fact that she tried to delete the emails from her server before investigators could subpoena them.
Nonetheless, it appears some of the emails were recovered anyway.
It also meant the information she sent and received — including classified and deeply sensitive national secrets — was unsecure.
In other words, Hillary’s paranoia and controlfreak secrecy opened up our nationalsecurity secrets to the Russians, the Chinese and who knows who else.
Nixon’s secret taping of his own Oval Office conversations, by contrast, wound up endangering only . . . him.
But the private server actually fits in well with Clinton’s MO. After all, she also operated a private State Department, a parallel government of her own.
The Obama White House wouldn’t let Clinton bring hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal in at State — so she hired him anyway and put him on the Clinton Foundation payroll as a key adviser.
Sid Vicious, in turn, operated an offthebooks spy ring intended to guide America’s involvement in the Libyan civil war (while aiming to position Blumenthal and his friends to pick up future business contracts rebuilding the country).
Nixon never dreamed up the idea of operating his own parallel government, as Hillary did.
Now over to the Republican side — and different echoes of Nixon.
Donald Trump has explicitly latched onto the Nixonian idea of the “silent majority” — the Americans ignored by the social and economic elites. The point may be even more relevant today, with so many looking for someone to acknowledge the disenfranchised bluecollar workers of the Information Age.
And finally, there’s Ted Cruz — who, as Rich Lowry noted in these pages last month, seems to be aiming at a Nixonesque path to victory “as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless.”
If Cruz ends up winning the Republican presidential nomination, Lowry added, “it’ll be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He’ll have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else” — just as Nixon did.
Last week, Cruz followed precisely this model to win the Iowa caucuses.
None of this excuses Nixon’s crimes or the institutional damage he did to the presidency along the way. But it’s a reminder that history’s second drafts are often kinder than the first.
With the added irony that Nixon can thank today’s leading Democrats for making him look good by comparison.