Can Bush Really Stand with Nixon?

I'm borrowing this week's Frank Rich column from Behind the Times (subscription wall) because I like their name. The site has posts and at least some NYTimes columns back to January 2006, which is a bit surprising to me, but more power to them (although I could stand it if they chose a more readable font).

Rich compares the Prez to Nixon and declares in his title, "Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used to Be." It's on the occasion of his visit to the new Broadway production of Frost/Nixon. Maybe I'd just better let him explain:

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.

I'll leave it up to you to decide what this may or may not have to do with Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil. After describing the splits in the Democratic and Republican parties over the issues of, respectively, timetables in Iraq and the immigration bill, he takes stock of the larger picture.

The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else. Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63 percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also buy broad provisions of the immigration bill — including the 66 percent of Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a guest-worker program.

What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how gridlocked Washington may look now.

Rich is optimistic. He's tending to believe the Republicans in Congress who've been saying Bush has until September to do something. I hope that's correct, but my feeling is that they're only saying what they think they have to. It's the path of least resistence to put off until September what you can do today. In September, although the situation in Iraq likely won't have shifted at all (unless it's to have gotten worse), the military reports will be unrelentingly sunny, and the Repubs will be arguing that we can't quit now. They won't abandon their Prez any more then than they did when the Iraq budget with timetables first came up. They'll come up with some justification for continuing their support, and I can only hope they'll pay for it in November 2008 (which still sounds like a looooong way away). But I'm babbling. Let's let Mr. Rich finish making his point.

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.

I don't know if the fact that I don't feel particularly conciliatory makes me question his argument or whether I've got some sort of logical basis for it, but this doesn't ring true for me. If we all agree, as Rich argued in a part of the piece I didn't quote, maybe we don't want a concilliatory candidate so much as someone who'll acknowledge that most of us are already standing together.