Don't you think we'd be lucky to get a Gerry Ford? I don't support Rich's "reasoning." He should stick to theater reviews. But Ford, indeed Nixon, were incomparably better than anything seriously up for POTUS now.
--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> [Utility opinionmonger Frank Rich of the NY Times,
> who can bat out Broadway
> reviews and political thumbsuckers with equal ease,
> has an entirely
> undeserved reputation as a scourge of America's
> deepening decadence. In
> truth, he's as much a misty-eyed sentimentalist
> about the supposedly
> permanent strength of America's "vital center" as
> the now-dead NYT columnist
> James Reston or the somewhat-alive WashPo pundit
> David Broder. Rich's
> column today is a classic: Saying that "Americans
> are exhausted by anger"
> due to the gross incompetence of the Bush
> Administration, Rich claims that
> the nation yearns for a "healer" like Gerry Ford
> rather than some firebrand
> ideologue (read: leftist) capable of challenging
> conventional pieties.
> Excerpt:]
>
> ... [T]here’s a strange paradox here. 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. ... This
> relatively unified America can’t be compared with
> that of the second Nixon
> term, when the violent cultural and political
> upheavals of the late 1960s
> were still fresh. But in at least one way there may
> be a precise political
> parallel in the aftermaths of two failed
> presidencies rent by catastrophic
> wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and
> are praying for the mood
> pendulum to swing.
>
> Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when
> he described himself as
> a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was
> (to a fault, as it turned
> out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see this
> equation at work now in
> Mitt Romney’s unflappable game-show-host persona, in
> John McCain’s
> unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan grin and in
> the unlikely spectacle
> of Rudy Giuliani trading in his congenital scowl for
> a sunny disposition.
> Hillary Clinton’s camp is doing everything it can to
> deflect new books
> reminding voters of the vicious Washington warfare
> during her husband’s
> presidency. Then again, even Michael Moore is
> rolling out a kinder, gentler
> persona in his media blitz for his first film since
> “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
>
> 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.
>
>
<http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/opinion/03rich.html?hp>
>
> Carl
>
>
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