The President’s unique brand of lurid authoritarianism has finally lost appeal, and he has lost the plot.
David Remnick, The New Yorker Editor (submitted by Charlotte Lin)
Two generations ago, in the fall of 1974, President Gerald Ford and the Republican Party approached the midterm elections with considerable dread. That August, Richard Nixon had learned that he could no longer outrun his crimes in the White House. One tape recording in particular, the so-called smoking gun, proved that he had conspired with his aide H. R. Haldeman to obstruct the investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Republican elders Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, and Hugh Scott told Nixon that impeachment in the House of Representatives was now certain, and conviction in the Senate likely. Nixon resigned, handing over his office to Vice-President Ford. A month later, Ford issued Proclamation 4311, pardoning Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed as President. Watergate, Ford said, had been “an American tragedy, in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
Until then, despite a dreadful economy, Ford had enjoyed approval ratings as high as seventy per cent. But the Nixon pardon was political poison, for both Ford and the G.O.P. His popularity plummeted by more than twenty points. And, in the midterms, the Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. The incoming class of rookie Democrats—among them Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, John Glenn, and Patrick Leahy—became known as the “Watergate babies.”
This week, some commentators, having exhausted the usual marine metaphors for midterm blowouts (a “blue wave” quickly became a “blue tsunami”), scurried to find historical points of comparison for the astonishing nationwide triumph of the Democratic Party. More than a few settled on the post-pardon midterms of 1974. (continued on page 2)