Sons of Nixon Run GOP Tricks

Just when you thought it was safe to run a decent campaign for President again, along come the Sons of Richard M. Nixon. The recent creation, elevation and distribution of the fiction of Michael S. Dukakis’ medical problems didn’t start last week. It originated in the primordial ooze of Nixon campaigns, from which modern Republican electoral practices have evolved.

In self-examination following the first reports, the press has generally been correctly critical of its own role in reporting the rumors behind the news. Rumors aren’t news but reports about rumors are news, was the rather questionable standard employed by the media. But the story on press coverage is secondary to the real one: The Bush Boys lifted this morsel from the gutter, held their collective noses and marketed it as an issue of presidential importance.

Their protests of innocence, delivered with a wink and a nudge, were received by the press with “boys will be boys” resignation. Listening to George Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, swear he hadn’t pushed the story leaves one nostalgic for the mastery of a true professional, found most recently in Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful sermons condemning extramarital, uh, watching.

When Atwater implies that anyone found to have pushed the story in his campaign will be fired, the heart flutters at this bold defense for the integrity of the democratic process. And then a question comes to mind: Can the Bush campaign really afford to lose that many people just before the convention?

Of course the boys had help. The warlords of right-wing pressdom made sure that all the sleaze that would fit was printed. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch’s Boston Herald functioned as wholly owned subsidiaries of the GOP. Their headlines alone gave the yellow journalism of the past a new respectability.

If this incident has any long-term significance it may be to mark the coming of age of the Sons of Nixon. Those young men who served as volunteers or interns or merely watched from the sidelines as the Nixon-H.R. Haldeman-Donald H. Segretti team did their thing in the early ‘70s, are now applying the lessons learned. While the country shunned and denounced the dirty tricksters, the Sons of Nixon were taking notes. The most dire consequences of that period may yet lay ahead in American politics.

Actually the current crew almost makes one wish for the return of Segretti. He at least had a sense of humor. Granted, disrupting Edmund S. Muskie’s press conference by having white mice dropped on the floor wearing blue ribbons saying “Muskie is a rat fink,” is not exactly kosher. But it doesn’t reach the same depths as attacking a man over his reaction to the death of his brother.

Unfortunately for the GOP troopers, they steered the press to the murky lower levels, and got everyone covered in mud with nothing to show for it. The press may show more reluctance in descending with them to their next story line.

Leaving the role of tradition aside, the “medical waste” incident underlines the bleakness of the GOP situation. It’s dawning on the Bush campaign that they don’t have an electable candidate. Understandably, they want to make sure the Democrats don’t have one either.