THE WAY HE WERE:

Can Nixon Save the GOP?: Sam Tanenhaus tries to resurrect a more-agreeable breed of conservatism. (Carl Swanson, Aug 23, 2009, New York)

So you think all this anti-Obama rhetoric is for naught? It won’t help restore the GOP to power?

One thing that really struck me during the campaign was Obama’s race speech. Not so much what he said about black people, but what he said about white people. And I watched it and thought, This is [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan’s argument about how white ethnics, who are not accountable for America’s legacy of slavery, have their grievance, too. And Obama really got that. Somehow he’s absorbed more of this conservative history. He is a kind of [Edmund] Burke. And I do think he and Clinton were the model contemporary presidents, which will of course shock all my conservative friends. They adjusted to the realities of the politics of their day, which is exactly what Burke and Disraeli and Buckley said politicians are supposed to do.

Setting aside how peculiar it is to be talking about the Obama presidency in the past tense, it seems early to compare him to Bill Clinton. If the UR does react to the reality of losing both chambers of Congress to the GOP by zagging as far rightwards as Bubba did, then he will indeed by conforming to the modern model of Thatcher, Blair, Howard, Harper, Clinton and W. That he has to first receive the same drubbing as his Democratic predecessor suggests he absorbed as little history as Mr. Tanenhaus has.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2009 12:27 PM