Misty watercolor memories

The last time we had anything like the Biden-Harris situation in terms of the VP running for president at the end of the incumbent president’s elected term was 1976, when Gerald Ford was the candidate at the end of the eight-year Nixon-Ford administration (yes I realize Ford actually was the president for two years before the election. It’s an inherently loose analogy). ETA: This was poorly phrased. I meant something else but am too tired to remember what now. . . .

Looking back, here’s what that administration accomplished:

(1) It managed to definitively lose a war for the first time in the nation’s history. It’s just remarkable how the nation’s unambiguous and unprecedented defeat in Vietnam has somehow been ascribed to the backstabbing of the dirty fucking hippies and other liberal comsymps, when in point of fact it was 100% a product of the Nixon-Ford administration’s conscious and calculated decision to withdraw US troops, and thereby allow the government of South Vietnam to be conquered by the NVA and the Viet Minh. But the GOP is the Strong Daddy party, while the Democrats are pacifist sissies who Cut and Run.

(2) It oversaw a huge economic downturn over those eight years. The financial markets were 40% lower in real terms in November of 1976 than they were in November of 1968. Imagine if Kamala Harris is president for the next eight years and the Dow goes from 42,000 to 25,000. I guarantee you the conclusion of very serious people would be that you can never make a Democrat president again because the world came to an end the last time we did that. But Republicans are “good for the economy” dontcha know.

(3) Violent crime saw what remains the worst eight-year spike in the nation’s history, rising by an astonishing 57% between 1968 and 1976. But the GOP is the party of law and order of course.

(4) Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the worst political scandal in the nation’s history up to that point, topped off by the vice president pardoning the president he succeeded, when the latter was driven out of office because he was such a crook that even the grandees of his own party were unwilling to stand behind him any longer. (Yes children this actually happened once upon a time and a very good time it was).

So after this comprehensive series of disasters in terms of both domestic and foreign policy, what happened?

What happened is that Jimmy Carter squeaked out a very narrow victory over Gerald Ford. This result, of course, illustrated implicitly the hard right turn that the country was actually in the midst of undergoing: Carter’s victory was the only one for a Democratic presidential candidate between 1964 and 1992. When Kids Today ™ look back on the dreaded neoliberalism of the Clinton administration et seq. what’s hard to appreciate is the understandable shell shock that the Democratic party endured over the previous 25 years, when the incredibly successful exploitation of culture war issues by Nixon and then Reagan made black white and up down. (Rick Perlstein’s four books about this era lay out just how this happened and it remains a harrowing tale even today).

I saw a bunch of TV ads this weekend about how under a Harris administration the nation’s worst murderers are all going to get sex change operations at government expense, before being released to join Venezuelan street gangs, and it’s obvious the GOP is going to play its Stairway to Freebird culture war classics until it’s beyond clear that this kind of thing doesn’t work any more.