Nixon's Back

I still so clearly remember my mom explaining to me the Saturday night massacre.

Well, Nixon is back. The National Archives released tapes that were made in November and December 1972, right after Nixon won in a landslide. (That was the first presidential campaign I remember).

Nixon invented resentment politics, of which Palin is just the latest to embrace and the first since Nixon to actually not be pretending to have a reason to be resentful unlike both Bush 41 and 43 who pretended to be cowboys instead of the Ivy Leaguers they in fact were.

Lest you think Nixon is irrelevant today, here's Noam Scheiber at the New Republic on the resentments of Sarah Palin in a piece called Barracuda.

That hardly makes her the first politician to run on class resentments--nearly every conservative from George W. Bush to Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against wine-swilling sophisticates. Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle.

Here's Nixon on the Ivy League -

NIXON: "The Ivy League presidents? Why, I'll never let those sons-of-b------ in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished ... Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again ... They came out against us when it was tough ... Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."

Daily Beast has a write up here.

Here's Keith on the new tapes:



Just in time for the Nixon/Frost movie.