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Me, Too

In what was probably supposed to be a searing critique of Republican Me-tooism, Jeffrey Lord decided to choose to emphasise what was probably the worst example of all the Republican losses of the 20th century, the 1960 election.  Not Wilkie, not Dewey (who both receive honourable mention later), but Nixon is his main target.  Remarkably, he gives Nixon […]

In what was probably supposed to be a searing critique of Republican Me-tooism, Jeffrey Lord decided to choose to emphasise what was probably the worst example of all the Republican losses of the 20th century, the 1960 election.  Not Wilkie, not Dewey (who both receive honourable mention later), but Nixon is his main target.  Remarkably, he gives Nixon credit for his ’72 win as a “conservative” after Nixon ran one of the most left-wing administrations on domestic policy of the previous fifty years.  Bush in ’88 won virtue of being Reagan’s successor, albeit by a narrow margin, but was actually a moderate, which he demonstrated during his administration and in the ’92 campaign.  Dole is blamed essentially for running on his record as a moderate Republican against an incumbent President (when incumbent Presidents have lost only three times in the last century), rather than engaging in the illusionism of Bush the Younger’s campaigns that portrayed him as a conservative.  In fact, what several of the moderates on Lord’s list have in common was that they were running against incumbent Presidents.  Two of the three others were incumbent Presidents who were punished either for their decisions (Nixon’s pardon, anyone?) or the perception that they were neglecting domestic policy and “out of touch.”  The conservative objection to all these campaigns was and ought to have been that the policies they were embracing or acquiescing in were bad policies, and not particularly that they have had a poor electoral record.   

The other part of “the legend” of the Nixon-Kennedy televised debate in 1960 was that, according to the radio audience who listened to the same debate, Nixon was ruled the clear winner.  Another problem with this line of criticism is that Eisenhower had won two major victories by running as a Me-too Republican, so Nixon might have reasonably concluded that Me-tooism was fairly popular.  Also neglected in this treatment is the extent to which JFK was engaged in his own kind of Me-tooism, trying to run to Nixon’s right on anticommunism.  (Incidentally, it is Eisenhower‘s successful example McCain has started citing as his model for this election, regardless of how inapt the comparison is.)  Finally, there is the small matter that JFK almost certainly stole the 1960 election, which makes the failure of Nixon’s campaign in that year rather more understandable.

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