Last week I talked about a group of people that never forget or forgive–which led to the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie more than 30-years after he wrote a book they didn’t like. Today, let’s talk about a group of people that always forget–and I guess you could say forgive–American voters.
Partly because of his continued interference, partly because of the continued campaigns of his acolytes, and partly because Democrats continue to use him as the Boogeyman in all of their attack ads, the 2022 mid-term elections and the 2024 presidential election will be all about Donald Trump. And noted political experts predict that will be disastrous for Republicans–not just in the short term, but in the long term as Trump will hang like an albatross around the neck of the party for generations to come. It sounds great in theory (which when you think about it, is all political science in about), but as history has shown, American voters have incredibly short memories.
Take Richard Nixon for an example. The Watergate scandal was going to take down Republican hopes in Washington for decades. The first time a President was shown to have engaged in criminal behavior–and then a fellow Republican pardoned him so he never had to face any legal consequences. That was surely going to sink GOP chances for the White House and control of the Congress for as long as the generations alive at that time were still able to vote.
Two years later, Gerald Ford (the pardoning President) lost a relatively close race to Jimmy Carter and Democrats solidified their majorities in the House and Senate. It looked like the American voters were in fact going to exact some revenge on the GOP. But just four years later, in 1990, Ronald Reagan won one of the most lopsided election victories since the early days of the Republic. And then four years after that, he scored an even bigger victory over Walter Mondale (in an electoral map that we likely will never see again in the US–losing just one state). So where was the “Nixon Effect”?
I will grant you, there were few if any Republicans that were still beating the drum for Richard Nixon in 1980 or 1984. Nixon resigned in large part because Republicans in the Senate went to him in August of 1974 and told him flat out that if impeachment went to that chamber, the votes were not there to save him. No GOP candidates after ’74 peppered their campaign speeches with references to Nixon and how he was “treated unfairly”, or that they believe that he is “still the President”. He made no appearances at campaign rallies for candidates–partly because no one wanted him there, and because an unspoken part of his pardon was that he would remove himself from politics for a good long while.
And maybe Democrats of that era really didn’t take advantage of “the albatross” well enough. I was just a kid at that time, but I don’t remember TV ads with Richard Nixon appearing as a ghost over the shoulder of Reagan like he was going to come out of Yorba Linda to run some shadow government. I also don’t remember seeing road signs or billboards proclaiming the GOP to be “The party of Nixon”. I’ll grant you, it was a more civilized political time, but maybe Democrats missed out on a golden opportunity to keep the Watergate train running for another decade.
The bottom line is that it took all of six years for voters to “forget” about the “gravest threat to our democracy that the nation has ever seen” and to overwhelmingly elect a candidate that shared many of the same political positions–with a more charismatic delivery than sourpuss Richard Nixon. And it certainly helped that Democrats looked like incompetent fools during those six years, unable to tame inflation, unemployment and myriad international crises.
Unless Republicans continue to let the “Trumpkins” hog the political spotlight and remind everyone about the latest “gravest threat to our democracy that the nation has ever seen”, what has transpired over the last six years will quickly fade from the collective memories of a majority of Americans. And the Republican party will do just fine–despite all of the dire predictions of today.
