Radio Free New Hampshire: Harris, Nixon And Rabbit Holes, Oh No

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Editor’s Note: We welcome back Radio Free New Hampshire. Michael Davidow took a few months off from his column a while back to finish his latest novel “Interdiction” about a veteran cop in a small New Hampshire town who shoots and kills a college student in a traffic stop gone awry. The ensuing investigation presents a tale of drug dealing, gunplay, and justifiable homicide. The lawyers are in control. The police are waiting and watching. The sole civilian witness to this killing is under indictment herself and silent regarding what she saw. The state’s most powerful politicians line up behind their officer. Only one thing stands between him and exoneration: another cop from another small town who begins to question what happened that night. His past has called him to his own separate truth.” It is awesome and available on Amazon.

Kamala Harris will not campaign to be California’s governor next year. “I made the decision that I just – for now – I don’t want to go back in the system. I think it’s broken,” she explained.

She should know because she helped break it. Joe Biden’s insistence on running for re-election, his subsequent unfitness for doing so, and his hand-picking Harris to replace him made a mockery of the democratic process. But that was all more of the same for Harris, whose rise in politics from local prosecutor to United States senator always had less to do with ability than it did with favoritism, and whose subsequent elevation to the White House came from playing race and gender cards. (In case anyone has forgotten, she ran on “the politics of joy.” Then she lost to Donald Trump, who ran on “you’re kidding me.”)

If anyone wanted to actually vote last year for a woman of color with political ability, they had their chance with Nikki Haley, who wisely has been lying low since that last election. I wonder if Harris will have the same good sense.

As always, past is prologue, especially in Sacramento. After Dick Nixon lost his bid for the presidency in 1960 he was somehow persuaded to run for governor there two years later. Pat Brown beat him fair and square. Nixon then delighted journalists everywhere by finally losing his temper in public. “Just think how much you're going to be missing,” he stated. “You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Nixon had a thin skin. He also, almost, kept his word.

The Republican Party of the early 1960s was divided into liberal and conservative wings. These were also its eastern and western wings. Eastern Republicans took their cue from Wall Street and were largely interested in foreign affairs and domestic tranquility – hence their progressivism on racial issues. They saw real need for government regulation (they had lived through too many financial meltdowns to feel otherwise). Western Republicans took their cue from Main Street. They tended to isolationism and they valued social stasis.

This split had natural causes. The post-war west was growing by leaps and bounds while the post-war east seemed stagnant. Say you were a small businessperson in Phoenix. Say you sold tires. By minding your own accounts and watching your neighborhood get bigger and bigger, you would sell more tires every year. Free enterprise worked (sound familiar, southern New Hampshire?). Say you were a small businessperson in Manhattan. Say you sold tires. Good luck. Free enterprise was a road full of rocks and most people needed help getting by (sound familiar, northern New Hampshire?).

Regardless, the eastern liberals had found their great champion in Eisenhower, who then brought the westerner Nixon onto his ticket to balance things out. The east coast never cared for the man.

After being defeated in California, though, Nixon did something funny. He moved to New York City to work as a lawyer. He made himself financially comfortable. He also made himself politically comfortable. He came to personally personify a melding of his party’s eastern and western factions.

The 1964 election turned out to be brutal. The Republican party tore itself apart. Rockefeller represented the east, Goldwater represented the west, and Nixon made himself available if the convention ever came to its senses, but that never happened. Goldwater prevailed after a vicious fight, then he was thoroughly thrashed by Lyndon Johnson and the fully unified Democrats. The country had no appetite for extremes of any sort.

Four years later, the Republicans had learned their lesson, and the man of moderation had his moment. Nixon came forward and won. He was a compromise candidate in the best sense of the word. And he won because the Democrats of 1968 did what the Republicans themselves had managed in 1964: they had torn themselves apart. Their convention in Chicago had devolved into madness on the subject of the Viet Nam war. Students and liberals paraded their ideological purity in front of the cameras and Mayor Daley’s cops had other plans for their city streets.

The ironies involved were tremendous. Daley’s cops were working class people who were standing up for their own kind. Daley himself opposed the war. But millions of Americans did not care. They saw insanity and rejected it.

It remains to be seen if today’s Democrats can benefit from this history, or if they are instead bound and determined to repeat it, by going down the bottomless rabbit holes of intifada and identity politics. Watch Harris for a preview of coming attractions.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also a defense attorney and the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising, which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka. Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.