McCain and the Orthogonians

I finally started reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland a few days ago, and all of the praise others have been heaping on it that seemed hyperbolic at the time is actually totally accurate. It’s gripping in a way that can be rare in history books, and reading it will make you smarter not just about the era in which the book takes place, but about the tactics that many politicians use today – a lot of which, needless to say, were born in that era.

A classic example is what Perlstein refers to as the “Orthogonians” and the “Franklins.” The Franklins were a club at Nixon’s small Quaker college made up of the elite and popular members of the student body, whereas the Orthogonians were the counter-group that Nixon founded; a club for people who resented the privilege of the Franklins.

You can probably see where this is going. The Orthogonians and Franklins aren’t just two clubs at a small college – they’re metaphors for two broad political factions. And Nixon’s greatest political victories came from manipulating Orthogonian resentment of the Franklins on a national level. It’s a tactic that’s still being used today.

Clinton, for example, used it in the Democratic Primary, once her inevitability started to slip. Here’s a Matt Taibbi piece from back in May:

Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things. She took an opponent who was relentless in his attempts to remain genial, positive and unifying, and managed to turn him into a divisive villain, a symbol representing every oversexed winner who ever had it too easy at the pimply kid’s expense.

It was probably Clinton’s most effective tactic against Obama, and now McCain’s giving it a whirl as well. Just listen to his last radio address:

With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to (quote) ‘the people of the world,’ (unquote) I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are, too.

The McCain campaign’s been pretty ADD when it comes to their anti-Obama messaging, but one thing that they’ve managed to stick to is this idea of arrogance. There’s a little dash of racial stereotyping to it – “uppitiness” rearing its ugly head again – but I think McCain’s strategists realize that the more effective message here is to focus on Obama’s supposed elitism – the fact that he’s an Ivy League-educated law scholar, handsome and well-read, and so on.

Here’s the thing: The Orthogonian strategy worked for Nixon and Clinton because to a certain extent, the Orthogonian shtick was authentic. Nixon wasn’t born into privilege, and he clawed his way to the top through a combination of Machiavellian canny and sheer stubbornness. Clinton suffered as a right-wing punching bag for over a decade, and was subjected to the worst kind of sexist slurs, including on network television, after she announced her candidacy for president.

McCain, on the other hand, while he suffered terribly in Vietnam, has had his political career handed to him on a silver platter. Yglesias:

The reality is that he’s been coasting for his entire political career, and his toughest race — the 2000 GOP presidential primary — was won where he lost badly. This feat of getting trounced by George W. Bush has somehow entered the collective imagination as an astounding political feat, but I’m willing to venture that it would actually be pretty easy for any vaguely plausible Senator or Governor to go up against the GOP frontrunner, imply that the party had become too right-wing, and lose the primary while winning a few contests in liberalish states with moderatish Republican Parties. McCain’s 2000 campaign was appealing to liberals because it consisted of us watching a Republican talk smack about Republicans, comparing the conservative machine to the Death Star, pointing out that GOP tax policies serve only the interests of a tiny elite, etc. But as an electoral strategy this was perverse and the results were predictable.

This whole fiasco gained McCain “Maverick” status which he spent the next several years deploying quite cannily to “corner the market” on bipartisanship in the US Senate and turn himself into a very influential legislator. And, clearly, even though he comes off as utterly uncharismatic to us peons who have to watch him on television he’s great at wooing the press in person. But this is his strong-suit — he’s a phenomenal Beltway player and operator, heir to a long line of skilled legislative players. But there’s a huge difference between the kind of actions that appeal to the sensibilities of the press (breaking with your party, campaign finance reform, “straight talk,” bashing Social Security) and the kind of actions that appeal to voters — projecting empathy and outlining ideas that will make people’s lives better.

McCain is, without a doubt, a proud member of the beltway elite. Sure the Orthogonian strategy might sort of work when he’s dead last in the Republican primary and his arch-nemesis is Mitt Romney, who was probably built in a lab somewhere. But as a Republican nominee facing off against the first black major party nominee, a man who actually did have to earn his way to the top? The old Nixon song and dance seems pretty weak. And at the end of the day, what it comes down to is that both Nixon and Clinton were devastatingly intelligent and politically savvy. McCain’s sort of a buffoon.

But just because this sort of strategy doesn’t seem particularly effective, doesn’t mean that it’s not the most effective one McCain has in his tool belt, especially combined with the subtle racist innuendo. These are some pretty dark times for the Republican Party.