Richard Milhous McCain (The Economist)

[struggle4progress]

Americans cannot escape from the shadow of Tricky Dick

Sep 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition

... Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country’s self-satisfied elites. The “silent majority” had been disoriented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values. And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism. Nixon recognised that the Republicans stood to gain from “positive polarisation”: dividing the electorate over values. He also recognised that the media, which had always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, to declare war on the “effete corps of impudent snobs” in the media, with their Ivy League educations and Georgetown social values ...

The Republicans now have all the material that they need to do what they do best. Mr Obama is an Ivy-League-educated intellectual whose associates include unrepentant terrorists and swivel-eyed preachers. Mr McCain’s running-mate, Sarah Palin, is a Nixonian fantasy come true, perfectly designed to create a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation. The “liberal media” cannot do its job without questioning Mrs Palin’s qualifications, which are astonishingly thin; but they cannot question her qualifications without confirming the Republican suspicion that they are looking down on ordinary Americans. “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators,” Mrs Palin told the Republican convention, doing her best to channel Agnew. “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.” ...

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12260881

Posted FYI only. Article contains a numbr of rightwing notions -- but may describe accurately the campaign McC/P plan

[begin_within]

1. Nixon's getting the last laugh now.

[Karl_Bonner_1982]

2. More like Richard Milhous McStabone, given his stupidity

I can't think of one thing McCain is proposing that makes sense economically. I long for the days when economics once again take center stage in the nation's ideological fights. The fact that the GOP's Reaganomics agenda is losing popular luster opens the door for a leftist economic populism to take root - but when?

Obama could hit back hard with economic populism in these debates, especially against a guy who makes the Growing Pains sidekick (the one that shared my old nickname) look like an Einstein. But alas, I fear that the Democrats are afraid of going on the offensive.