FRANK RICH: Failed Presidents Ain’t What They Used to Be

[kevinmc]

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. ......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/06/frank-rich-failed-presidents-aint-what.html

[babylonsister]

1. Wow. "Too slight to hate" is accurate, though the hate is there, as is

the revulsion, at least for me. Another great read by Mr. Rich!

[Old and In the Way]

2. The best one sentence description I've seen for Bush.

"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."

Ain't that the truth...."an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis".

I really think this will be the lasting impression of Bush the Lesser..for perpetuity.

[The Count]

3. Poor Matthew McConaughey! I don't even like him and I feel sorry for him!

[young_at_heart]

4. My anger began when I first heard him speak

I was in disbelief that someone who spoke so badly would consider running for president. Why aren't his supporters embarrassed by his actions, his words and his behavior?

[FloridaJudy]

5. Bush is just Warren G. Harding

Without the good looks, brains and charm. He's able to do a lot more harm than Harding ever did because of advances in technology.

Harding also had the advantage of dying during his first term, so the damage was limited.

[blueworld]

6. Maybe it really is the end of the world

This is the first time in my memory where I disagree with most of Frank Rich's analysis - he's my idol. I'm dazed.

I wasn't old enough to vote when tricky Dick first took over the crown. We weren't all that far from the days of Camelot & I still naively believed that the US government was basically honest & forthright & only some politicians were miserable lying crooks. Then Nixon not only dragged the US presidency into the mud but did it against every principle of fair play I was taught in grammar school, and hired a bunch of useless thugs to commit a mundane street burglary worthy of any juvenile delinquent gang. Nixon pushed the knife in the mortally wounded innocence of my generation, I think.

The tiresome argument that the left expected the Dems to end the Iraq war immediately is plain silly. They have to start somewhere - that spending bill would have been ideal. They huffed & puffed in the press, and then they folded with a whimper. If they had the guts to fight, how does Rich or anyone else know which Repugs might have swung over time? Stop using the left as fodder for individual ego trips. We need the Dems, but let's be honest about that playbook. Veto-proof majorities aren't necessary for honest, experienced, hard-working politicians - as is evidenced by 200 years of American history. You can accomplish quite a bit with a simple majority.

[The Count]

7. I'm with you here. Nixon never expressed any regret for his crimes so revisionism

of his person is not warranted. He was as much of an SOB as W - albeit somewhat less of a dimwit.

[KoKo]

8. Sadly...Frank Rich really doesn't get it about America when he says we long for "easy listening"

While this is an interesting article...the conclusions are too light, imho.

quote that bothered me:

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.

[Oak2004]

9. "Light" doesn't even to begin to describe it

I can't pretend to know the mood of the entire country, but the mood I see here is anything but "easy listening". It's more like "enraged and looking for something-- anything -- to do to actually change things." "Easy listening" is escapist, something one does when worn out and is in a place of relative comfort: the people I know know there's no escape from the crisis we're in, that they and their families face, and just want to know what they can do to save themselves, their family, and their country from disaster.

You don't do "easy listening" when you live on the edge of bankruptcy and/or homelessness, when every day you go to work fearing you'll learn your job has disappeared, when the news -- the real news, the stuff that no amount of Paris Hilton coverage can hide from you-- is that billions more dollars have been burned in Iraq, that 5 or 10 or 15 more kids are coming back in body bags today. There is no retreat into "easy listening" when your cousin, brother, sister, son, or daughter is a broken human being, scared and jumpy and depressed and drinking and sometimes talking suicide, yet the military is about to send them back to Iraq for a fourth tour (or is extending that tour another few months), or when your or your neighbors bury their relative and your town begins to realize that its dead are mounting. There is no "easy listening" when you look at your leaders in Washington and they *are not listening*, but are instead feeding and funding and furthering the forces that are ruining you financially and killing your kin and neighbors. And then your see with your own eyes, and feel the heat of, a global environmental disaster, one that could destroy the human race, and will certainly destroy our civilization, and you see absolutely nothing of import being done about it by your government.

"Easy listening", Mr. Rich?? More like you haven't been listening.