Jeb isn't tough/alpha enough, Rubio seems too young and idealistic for a gritty moment, Cruz is too much of a straight ideologue.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 22, 2015
At first I thought NYTimesman Ross Doubthat was just dressing up some standard Repub Hillary-bashing for the centrists when he went “Searching for Richard Nixon“:
… The odd truth is that the most Nixon-like candidate in 2016 — in the sense of being ideologically protean and personally ruthless, at least — might be the one waiting for Republicans in the fall. But the unfortunate reality for the country is that Hillary Clinton might offer Nixon’s weaknesses without his strengths: All the seaminess and paranoia, but none of the actual achievements…
(Everything you lie-brals claim to hate about Tricky Dick, and she doesn’t even have one!)
But, no, he actually longs for a tough Republican daddy who could (if one were predisposed) present his jingoism and xenophobia suitably disguised with “gravitas”…
… It’s a truth universally accepted that nobody ever, ever wants to be Richard Nixon. But there are times, and this might be one of them, when the country needs a little Nixon. The country and maybe especially the Republican Party, which has been trying to forget its debt to Tricky Dick ever since the helicopter carried him away…
… Nixon knew how to channel an angry, “who’s looking out for me?” populism without letting himself be imprisoned by its excesses. A similar anger has propelled Trump, but as David Frum has pointed out, for all of the Donald’s “silent majority” call-outs he’s clearly more a George Wallace than a Nixon. Some of the anxieties he’s exploited are legitimate, just as the crime wave that Wallace fixated on really was a clear and pressing problem. But like Wallace, Trump is a provocateur and bigot — or a provocateur playing a bigot — with a deserved ceiling on his support.
The problem for Republicans is that they haven’t found a candidate who can appeal to Trump’s politically-disaffected supporters — whether they’re worried about immigration, jobs, terrorism or an overreaching social liberalism — without trafficking in slurs and empty bluster. But that’s roughly what Nixon did in 1968 and 1972, when he addressed (liberal historians would say exploited, but we can have that debate another time) widespread anxieties over social change and disorder without ever repudiating racial equality or civil rights.
In this year’s Republican primary, the non-Trump candidates have struggled mightily to make that kind of nuanced case. And they’ve struggled, in part, because they lack a second Nixonian gift: An instinct for the non-ideological character of many American voters, primary voters included…
On the one hand, we have groaning entitlement programs (Obamacare now included) in desperate need of some reform; on the other, we have a stagnant economy and a hard-pressed electorate that fears any fraying of the safety net. No president can deal with that combination without a Nixonian level of ideological flexibility – which is to say, more than President Obama has shown, and more than the demands of Republican orthodoxy allow.
Then on foreign policy, too, a dose of Nixon’s cold-eyed view of world affairs would dramatically improve what Republicans are currently promising. Obama’s foreign policy is, put charitably, a stumbling mess. But the Republican pretense that all we need to do is name our enemies and crush them misses the deep complexity of America’s challenges…
Oh, for the halcyon days of yore when those people (not just people of color and women in general, but the working-class voters who knew so little about discreet marketing as to support George Wallace) knew their place! — as cannon fodder, at the voting booth as well as in the jungles of Vietnam.
Whatever terrible things happen in the Republican primaries, there is at least the minor consolation that Ross Doubthat shall be miserable with the results.