The swing thing

...And in reality, despite the form-sheets, Nixon was tragically—and farcically—illprepared for the presidency because he lacked any moral dimension whatever...

...The voters probably would have elected Caligula except that the poor chap never made it to thirty-five...

...Abruptly, the "honest" dropped out of the general perception of Ford...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 680...

...Of several minds: Frank Getlein THE SWING THING ONE KINDLY LIGHT AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM WOE AND DESPAIR is all about I see, Democrats clutching what hair they have left, crying out to heaven, rending their garments and sprinkling their clothes with ashes...

...As the '76 campaign wore on and people got to see more and more of Jimmy Carter, they liked what they saw less and less...

...He never learned, really, that there was a truly equal body of government at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, that both houses of it enjoyed enormous majorities of his own party and that the way government works is for the executive and the legislative branches to talk to each other, to persuade each other, to give each other reliable information on probabilities and possibilities, and so on, all the elementary machinery known to any serious high school student of government...

...They have no one but themselves to blame for the straits in which they find themselves...

...Like the frogs, too, we protest to the Zeus of the ballot box and bring on the next stork or log...

...Moreover, he had a secret plan to end the war...

...Thus in his turn, Ford was repudiated at the polls...

...Ronald Reagan...

...Now they have given us Ronald Reagan and are moaning and groaning as if some mysterious power from outer space had inflicted the second California Republican upon us in less than a decade...

...For some years I used to give an annual talk to the Women's National Democratic Club...

...While the members of the gang filed glumly into their prison cells, the chief crook went to the comfort of his largely government-paid-for palace in California, attended by government-paid flunkies of various kinds, and proceeded to paste together the book that made him rich...

...he merely had an advisor and later Secretary of State with ambitions, in time fulfilled, to be the biggest bomber in history...

...Eugene McCarthy offered himself as a Democrat against the war and Johnson withdrew after what amounted to repudiation in New Hampshire...

...Lyndon Johnson was remarkably well-prepared for the presidency and he blew that whole capital of legislative expertise, personal friendship or at least acquaintance with everyone who mattered, an uncanny ability to practice politics, not in the superficial sense of getting elected but in the democratic sense of achieving workable compromise between opposed forces, all that and more, for the sake of an idiotic, impossibleto-win war halfway around the globe, based on the blithering assumption that if we didn't fight them there, the Viet Cong would be landing at Santa Barbara as soon as they got a boat...

...Carter's basic problem as president was that when he came into office he hadn't a clue as to how die national government works and when he leaves, in January, he still won't...

...Ironically, after the Pardon, if Watergate was to be put behind us, in Ford's phrase, it could only be done by ousting Ford...

...It was no such power, it was the Democrats...

...That's the message of the electorate and it is going to keep on being the message until one of the two parties, or possibly a third, comes up with a new model that works...

...It was invariably on some uplifting subject in the arts but I always seized the opportunity to tell them the only reason I voted for their stupid party was that if I voted Republican my arm would fall off...

...As such he was rather a relief from the sturm und drang of Johnson and Nixon and might well have presided over a kind of return to normalcy without the Teapot Dome...

...5 December 1980, 670 On any conventional form-sheet, Richard Nixon was at least as well prepared for the presidency as Johnson and Humphrey: Representative and Senator from the most populous state, a spectacular career in the Senate, two terms as vice-president to the most universally popular president since FDR...

...It was the Democrats who gave us Jimmy Carter in the first place as it was assuredly the Democrats who gave us Richard Nixon...

...My realist wife points out that the other brand will have the same, perhaps worse, problems: I reply that that's doubtless true, but at least I will not be swindled twice in a row by the same swindler...

...When I started making money— shortly after I stopped teaching at Catholic colleges—I started buying new cars, not from any wish for vulgar display, but simply in happy anticipation of leaving behind the problems that seemed to me inherent and endless in the used cheapies I had been buying 'til then...

...Anyway, that's why all the gloom and doom about the dread swing to the right is misplaced...

...Hubert Humphrey, another monumentally well-prepared Democrat for the presidency, was destroyed by the war as Johnson was, since he was unable to come out against it while serving as Johnson's Vice President...

...It was one thing to offer Jimmy Carter once when no one knew much about him except his ostentatious piety, but to offer him again, after the nation had watched him in action and, rather more, inaction, for four years, is either stupidity or hubris or both and it got the reward those qualities usually get and well deserve...

...He seriously believed, as far as one can tell, that saying something is the same as accomplishing it...

...There isn't and hasn't been any swing anywhere except away from fools and knaves in the office of the presidency and we have had a lot of them lately...

...The inevitable suspicion, which still lingers and always will, was that there had been a deal: Ford got the White House, Nixon got the Pardon, and Haig, the honest broker in the transaction, got the captain-generalcy of the Free World...

...He had moved so far so fast on antiCommunism as a surrogate for morality as well as for serious thought, that it never occurred to him to wonder about the oughtness.of actions, only about their short-term efficacy and, if needed, their deniability...

...Now I hope they see what I meant...

...moreover, the problems are more expensive and you pay the money to the same outfit that sold you the car with all its defects...

...Finally, confronted with the choice, they chose the mediocrity they didn't know over the one they did know who had sold out to Nixon...

...In reality, of course, he had no such plan...

...Among its lesser evils, that war tore the Democratic party apart...

...Well they might...

...He was duly ousted, if barely...

...the new cars have been just as full of problems as the used ones...

...And then there was Carter and now there is Reagan as the only available other choice and you can't really blame the electorate...

...He believed, with TR, that the presidency was a bully pulpit, but unlike Teddy, that's all he believed it was and for that matter he wasn't all that bully in that pulpit...

...He was, in his own word, a crook...

...Out of all this a pattern emerges and it is not a pattern of any swing to the right...

...The Democrats not only gave them a do-nothing president but, having watched him do nothing and having themselves protested his doing nothing, proceeded to offer him again...

...At that it was a close thing...

...Reagan's main qualification was that he wasn't Carter, just as Carter's was that he wasn't Nixon or Nixon's servitor and pardoner, Ford, and Nixon's was that, as of 1968, he had not fought the war in Indochina, killed thousands of Americans and uncounted Indochinese for no perceivably rational purpose...

...It's a melancholy exercise but as someone said when Democratic politics were fun, Let's look at the record...

...But as Johnson blew his capital of governmental brilliance, so Ford blew his of amiable, honest mediocrity when, as if in response to a thirty-day due-bill, he performed die one notable act of his term in office, the pardon of the chief begetter and beneficiary of all the Watergate crimes...

...My solution to this problem has been never to buy the same brand twice...

...A delusion, of course...

...Like the frogs in the pond, we have been getting for our kings storks who eat us or logs who simply lie there...

...It is a pattern of rejecting one unsatisfactory president after another...

...Like Johnson he was elected by the greatest majority in presidential history and then decisively repudiated by the same people through their elected representatives, including those of his own party...

...Nixon's hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford (chosen when the first choice, Spiro Agnew, turned out to be a crook himself and became the first baby thrown from the sleigh speeding toward impeachment) was widely perceived, and more or less correctly so, as an amiable and honest mediocrity...