2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumZero Hedge: "Is Hillary Clinton the Democrat's Richard Nixon?"
Richard Nixons similarities to Hillary Clinton are remarkable:
1: Both were highly successful politicians who had exceptionally negative net-approval ratings from the U.S. public, but were viewed highly favorably by the voters within their own Party.
2: Both were unsuccessful in their first run for the Presidency, but managed to come back and ran considerably more successful campaigns the second time around.
3: Both were highly distrusted, except by the voters within their own Party.
4: Both went into their Presidential campaign years (especially the second time around) as being the candidate with experience.
5: Both were war-hawks and proponents of a big military, but were also liberals on social policies and regulatory policies (for example, Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, several environmental initiatives including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Mammal Marine Protection Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency; and, he started the Earned-Income Tax Credit, which "now lifts more children out of poverty than any other government program).
6: Whereas Nixon, running during the Cold War against the sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, lied that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam war' (he actually had and applied a secret plan to extend the Vietnam war), and he won the Presidency on the basis of that lie; Hillary Clinton, running against the anti-restoration-of-the-Cold-War progressive Bernie Sanders in 2016, lies by saying that she has a plan to end the war in Russia-allied Syria.
Sanders says: Of course Assad is a terrible dictator. But I think we have got to get our foreign policies and priorities right. The immediate it is not Assad who is attacking the United States. It is ISIS. And ISIS is attacking France and attacking Russian airliners. The major priority, right now, in terms of our foreign and military policy should be the destruction of ISIS. Clinton says an emphatic no to that: "Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians. T...
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So, she is promising regime-change in Syria and saying that its the prerequisite to defeating ISIS which is an absurd lie, since ISIS, and Al Qaeda, and all the other jihadist groups who have flocked into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad, are certainly not the way to defeat ISIS, nor to defeat the other jihadist groups there, all of which are anti-Assad, as is Clinton herself. Clearly, then, her plan to win the war in Syria is, essentially, to replace Assad with jihadists to whom the U.S. is sending thousands of tons of weapons. ...
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7: Both Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton were/are famous for being secretive, and for distrusting everyone except his/her proven-loyal personal entourage loyalty is a higher value to them than is any other. They are paranoid very us-versus-them and all-too-willing to use unethical means of defeating them (not really the American peoples foreign enemy, but, above all, their own domestic enemies-list).
8: Both Nixon and Clinton famously use curse-words profusely in private, and treat their subordinates like trash, and rule them by fear.
9: Both of them had/have established records backing coups abroad, in order to impose the will of Americas President, no matter how bloody (such as the coups that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Allende in Chile in 1973, and the coups that overthrew Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, and Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014).
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)Response to amborin (Original post)
CompanyFirstSergeant This message was self-deleted by its author.
Bjornsdotter
(6,123 posts)...and "When the President does it, it's not illegal"
Yeah, I see the similarities.
BernieforPres2016
(3,017 posts)Nixon: the Checkers speech in 1952, loss in the 1960 Presidential race, loss in the 1962 California governor's race (to the press: "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more"
Hillary: the massive failure of Hillarycare and subsequent rout of Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections followed by her taking a lower profile through the rest of the Bill Clinton presidency, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the loss to Barack Obama in 2008
BernieforPres2016
(3,017 posts)mmonk
(52,589 posts)amborin
(16,631 posts)mmonk
(52,589 posts)BernieforPres2016
(3,017 posts)He pushed through the Clean Air Act of 1970, one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history.
I am not naive enough to think Nixon wasn't a Clinton-like triangulator. I doubt he would have done any of these things if he hadn't considered them good politics which boosted his chances for reelection.
PufPuf23
(8,787 posts)Nixon also was responsible for price controls and gasoline rationing in response to Arab oil embargo. Roe vs Wade occurred while Nixon was POTUS and, while he did not use his position to force the issue, Nixon was pro-legal abortion. Federal affirmative action programs were initiated under Nixon. Desegregation in general was supported by Nixon. The widespread desegregation of Southern schools occurred under Nixon. Nixon supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Nixon proposed health care legislation similar to ACA. Nixon appointed more women to federal positions than any prior POTUS. Nixon opened China. Economic policy under Nixon was Keynesian (the New Deal and Great Society are examples of Keynesian economics). Nixon obtained the first nuclear arms control deals with USSR, opened trade, and visited USSR as POTUS. After the Yom Kippur War, Nixon made peace with Egypt and started Middle East peace talks. Nixon supported a two-state solution for Israel.
That said, IMHO it takes a Reagan or a Bush to find worse POTUSs that were more despicable in character.
Nixon's history as POTUS also illustrates how far the 21st Democratic establishment policy has drifted to the right and actually resembles GOP policy of the Nixon era.
Nixon will go down in history because of the dirty tricks known as Watergate. Worse Nixon lied to the nation to get elected and deliberately extended the Vietnam War while meddling to undermine the Paris Peace talks to achieve POTUS.
I may have been the first at DU to note that Hillary Clinton resembles Richard Nixon.
Alas the comparison has more than a little validity.
BTW I was a career federal employee and Cal student when Nixon was POTUS as well as a registered and voting Democrat.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)that an economy had to be sustainable and not handed over to Chicago grad students and asshole traders in brown suits who'd sell their mum for a profit
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)Republicans may get their Clinton impeachment after all.