The 37th president of the United States has resigned, died, been buried and can now be remembered through golf balls that bear his signature in green ink and sell for 10 bucks a sleeve at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif.
They’re crummy golf balls. The president who opened China to the West can’t even get his name on a Titleist.
Nixon, though, is achieving a different legacy. His philosophy of politics has come to be gospel for both national political parties.
It’s pretty well known that Nixon once told Bob Dole the way to the White House is to run to the philosophical edge of the party in the primaries and hustle to the center for the general election. To some extent, many candidates do that anyway.
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This year, though, everybody’s taking Nixon’s advice with a vengeance. They’re all running pell-mell to the center. And now that the Republicans and Democrats have just finished their national conventions, it is clear what that advice will mean for politics.
These were the most polite conventions on record. They consisted of people saying, “We consider our opponent to be a scholar and a gentleman, but we are dismayed to discover that we cannot abide by a single thing that he believes, in his heart of hearts, to be true.”
This is far less cheeky than having the governor of Texas say of the president of the United States: “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” But it’s not as much fun, and it’s not even as illuminating.
Even worse, the conventions were close to meaningless.
Since the political parties don’t want to offend each other, and since they desperately want to occupy the same place, the absolute center, voters are left to gamble.
If they vote for the new Bob Dole, will he on Nov. 6, suddenly metamorphose into Newt Gingrich and Richard Armey, ready to eat their young?
If they vote for Bill Clinton, will he on Nov.6, suddenly metamorphose into Lyndon Johnson and George Meany, ready to eat their taxes?
The two political conventions gave absolutely no clue, because they sounded almost exactly alike. They were about values, moderation, empowerment, moderation, the middle class and moderation.
This is because the Republicans remembered their history and forgot the last few years, and the Democrats forgot their history and remembered the last few years.
The Republicans sent out the likes of Colin Powell on the first day, and he talked about the party of Lincoln and diversity of opinion and the rich history of the GOP. It was a great speech. It would have been a great speech if he had given it at the Democratic convention, where he wouldn’t have had to tiptoe around some of the things that were in it.
Powell mentioned three debatable issues in his speech: corporate welfare, abortion and affirmative action. On each of them, he is closer to the Democrats than the Republicans.
He gave a speech, people applauded, and the networks apparently couldn’t find Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott afterward to offer responsible opposing opinions.
Dole wanted Colin Powell to be the face of the Republican Party, even though less than 3 percent of the convention delegates were black and Powell would have had a far easier time getting elected president than winning the nomination of the Republican Party.
Dole wanted Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to be the face of the Republican Party, so he gave her a prominent speech, too. It’s fortunate that the Texas Republicans who tried to keep her out of the delegation because she’s pro-choice didn’t get away with it. She would have had to deliver her San Diego convention speech from Austin.
If Republicans masked the current intentions of their party leaders to put on a happy face for America, at least they were following the advice of one of their own presidents. Nixon did many sorry things, but he also won the White House twice.
The Democrats have won the White House exactly twice in the last 32 years. So they decided to take Nixon’s advice, too. This was scripted for them by Dick Morris, the former Republican political consultant who left the Clinton campaign Thursday in disgrace.
The Democrats just wrote off their own past: sent Jimmy Carter fishing, buried FDR and LBJ and turned the site of the 1968 convention into DaleyWorld, where the cops were concierges and the ubiquitous Host Committee greeters were instructed to smile often and never talk about politics.
Their convention was clean, polite and devoid of personality. They sent up their best talkers, Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson, but kept their best lines in the closet.
“Forget about new Democrats, old Democrats, conservative Democrats, liberal Democrats, neo-liberal Democrats,” Cuomo said. Well, that about runs the gamut. The Democrats forgot they were Democrats.
It would be odd if the president who presided over secret slush funds, the Watergate break-in and assorted other dirty tricks leaves as a legacy two political parties who want nothing so much as to be friendly, kind and alike.
But then, Nixon legacies should come with low expectations. The $45 quartz watch with the picture on the face of Nixon greeting Elvis Presley (available by mail order from the Library & Birthplace) makes those golf balls look exquisite.
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