Kennebung Looks at Nixon, or, Talkin’ Dick-in-Bush Electile Dissfunkshun BLUE-who’s

What’s past is prologue. - The Tempest.

♫ Ah woke up this MORNin’ [STRUMS BLUES GUITAR]

Thought ah sahw a dead presiDENT…

Ah-hah turn’d the TV on this MORNin’-ah

Ah done DREAMED ah sahw that dead presiDE-HENT, nahw – YEAH-hey!…[twang-twang-twang, 6x]

Thought ah wuz havin’ me a FLASHback, nahw -

Turn’d out ah wuz jes’ watchin’ those Dick-in-Bush daily BLUE-who’s, YAH-ah, YAH-ee…♫

Any resemblance between figures depicted below and actual personages living or dead would be so freakin’ historical.

[Alexandria is blogged before {and by} a delayed bloodshot pajama'd stubbled fur-tongued Throbbin'-Head audience selected without regard, or recourse, to sex - BLOGOVER ANNOUNCER.]:

[CUE FRACTURED FAIRY TALES THEME]

EDWARD EVERETT HORTON: Once upon a time, there was a thin-skinned two-term Republican president from America’s southwestern quadrant, whose initial White House victory was crucially assisted, so said many, by the misguided ambitions of a third-party candidate who peeled enough votes away from the Democratic candidate – the sitting Vice President – to enable a GOP upset in a polarized electoral year.

The new GOP administration revealed early a reputation for secrecy, and for an expansive interpretation of presidential authority; classic CEO archetypes such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were noteworthy among the president’s men. Over time, his policies and demeanor earned scorn on both the left and the right. The left’s hatred of him turned proverbial, both for partisan reasons and on general principles all his own; publicists friendly to him painted the demographic opposed to him and his supporters as elitist and morally degenerate, in contrast to the humble, voiceless, law-abiding, patriotic family types who had helped elect him twice. Among those “elitists” was a press corps accused of trying to bring him down. During his tenure, The New York Times became embroiled in controversial episodes in which that paper stood accused of jeopardizing the national security by revealing state secrets. The name of Bob Woodward, of The Washington Post, would appear on a couple of bestselling fly-on-the-wall books chronicling the high-tension backstage maneuverings among the president and his administration.

Sections of the right came to distance themselves from “their” president, too, though they shared the deep-seated culture-war loathing for the left-Democratic types demonized in the schematic Kulturkampf noted above. Rock-ribbed, square-jawed right-wingers known for their bedrock commitment to limited federal spending and small government shook their fingers at the creation under the president’s administration of new federal agencies and the expansion of old ones, as well as his tendency, whether motivated electorally or from ideological muddle, to favor an expansion of the welfare state, as well as his rampant cronyism and bunkered siege mentality. George Will noted such tendencies with disdain, and distanced his brand of conservatism from the sort of sentimental GOP tribalist loyalism on display elsewhere among “movement” oriented, on-message shock troops too timid, enemy-fearing or party-whipped even for friendly, constructive dissent.

The persistent shadow of Vietnam backlit the president’s re-election campaign, and his Democratic opponent, a decorated war veteran, attracted a telling quotient of ostensibly freelance GOP skullduggery and character assassination among those who felt the president’s electoral success was not secure enough to be won by above-board means. Two years after his re-election, though, mounting disaffection with presidential abuse of power and with the president’s party had rendered him dead in the water politically, ratified in midterm elections favorable to the Democrats. In the economy, energy woes

and the cyclical, spiraling reckonings triggered by monetary mismanagement added to the mounting discontent.

The presidential election succeeding the two won by this Republican president pitted a Republican Navy war veteran seen by many as fatally bound to his polarizing predecessor’s tainted and toxic legacy – it was said that electing him would be the moral and practical equivalent of a third term for his tarnished predecessor – against an idealist good-government Democrat with a growing halo and a sackful of Sunday-school piety, delivered unto the Americans as healer of a frayed and fractured, polarised partisan polity. The Democratic challenger and his do-gooder acolytes hatched for his electoral benefit an arsenal of content-free motivational slogans, and much was made of his religious background, humble beginnings, and self-made outsider’s rise to success. Beneficiary of an insurgent “New Politics” tendency in his party and of disenchantment with “insiders” generally, he upended the long-marinated expert narratives in which the clinching of the Democratic nomination by one among several seasoned, battle-tested party veterans girded by Beltway fortifications was all but certain. By comparison to the turn-serving bean-counting seniors in the party who were seen as more or less entitled, he seemed to have strode great leagues almost overnight from out of nowhere, the fortunate son of a desire to escape the grime of the dark era preceding him, in which Jurassic Democratics and their machine politics were part of the enabling problem.

This nimble if earnest center-left Democrat, post-conventions, ran the fall gauntlets alongside his Navy-war-vet center-right GOP rival, a perceived moderate whose vanquishing of rivals favored by movement types by convention time helped suppress GOP turnout in November. The Republican candidate’s generally leaden and uninspiring demeanor and tendency toward confused gaffes, and public perceptions tying him to the discredited Republican past both recent and arising from exhausted culture wars, were enough to enable the charismatic sermonizer from away to win by a close margin in November.

His single term was proverbial, as his sanctified aura

And SO you SHALL [PLINK!]!

proved no match for the gritty realities of power asserting themselves from the outset of his term. Energy crises, and growing pains at the pump, building and swept under the rug under the eight GOP years preceding him, were only one large source of discontent. Troubles with Iran grew from mild tremors unto Richter-worthy shakes electorally, helping sink him after four tumultuous years in the White House. A newly assertive Kremlin leadership consolidated its imperial buffers, amid talk of a “New Cold War”, again inherited in part from the error-prone Republican terms prior, and amplified by innovations in Democratic naiveté.

Meanwhile, during their four years in the presidential “wilderness”, conservative Republicans sought to capitalize on discontent with their hash-in-the-pan opponent in attempting to field an authentically right-wing challenger with executive experience, talking fiscal discipline amid a deepened inflationary recession. Such economic gloom, along with deepening cracks along foreign fronts, peeled off enough voters from among hothead, disaffected working-class, urban and ethnic legacy Democrats – the so-called “Ragin’ (or “Pagan”, or “Republican”) Democrats” – to usher into the Rose Garden the latest elephant from the electoral parade down Pennsylvania Avenue…

[tip: the Kennedy-looks-at-Lincoln engraved penny from the 25-cent gumball machine next to the electric pony in the department-store vestibule and in Johnson Smith catalogs, c. 1973]