Politics of resentment: The tortoise

This piece should really be titled, “Hillary and Nixon,” but I thought a catchier title would be more likely to attract attention. After all, who wants to read about two such unappealing characters as our persistent 37th President and our perennial wannabe?

The parallels between Richard Nixon and Hillary Rodham Clinton are immediately apparent, and deeply disturbing. They include unbridled ambition unchecked by any sense of morality, pathological dishonesty, and a banality of thought and behavior which reflects as poorly on the American electorate as it does on them.

{mosads}Limitations of space preclude documenting all of these character defects, which have been explored and exposed elsewhere. What remains is to identify why Nixon and Hillary were able to succeed (and yes, she has succeeded; although not yet coronated, anyone who gets this close to the top spot is at least a Silver Medal winner).

There are two reasons for their success. The first is, like the tortoise in the fable of old, they never quit. Most people who gain their Party’s nomination for President and lose in the general election end up yielding the spotlight to someone else. On rare occasions (Thomas Dewey and Adlai Stevenson come to mind) they get a second shot in the very next election, and then they move on. Only Nixon and Hillary came back after an eight year hiatus, having slowly, steadily, like the tortoise, continued doggedly around the track until they got to the finish line.

Nixon and Hillary are like the tortoise in another respect. They each developed a hard shell, underneath which they could retreat, and after a while they chose to live within that shell. It may be that their personalities were a rarity among politicians, true introverts, not comfortable having to mingle with the public, and more uncomfortable than most dealing with prying reporters. This would explain Hillary’s embarrassing “Chipotle episode” this week, and is reminiscent of Nixon’s awkwardness.

There is a far more disturbing parallel that goes to the heart of what led to Nixon’s downfall and what explains Hillary’s booting away the nomination the last time around and her almost incomprehensible series of unforced errors this time, when she doesn’t even have any opposition. I refer to the fact that both Nixon and Hillary predicated their candidacies on the politics of resentment. We ultimately found out that the burden of resentment they each carried should have disqualified them from office.

Nixon’s masterful “Silent Majority” campaign in ’68 was essentially an appeal to Americans who were angry about many things that were happening in America. He was able to attract blue collar workers and white southerners and thus build a winning coalition.

Hillary’s campaign aims, of course, to attract women and she seeks to stir up resentment even if it doesn’t already exist. She is also on message in pointing her finger at the rich, though given her own greed and her ties to Wall Street this is almost laughable. If she can stir up resentment on the part of the middle class, she too will have a winning coalition.

A study of the life of Richard Nixon leads to the inevitable conclusion that his own sense of self-pity and resentment were the driving forces in his life. The intellectuals didn’t respect him, his own boss, Dwight Eisenhower, marginalized and belittled him, and so forth. 

With Hillary it’s the same program. The press is unfair, the right wingers conspire against her, boo-hoo.

What history tells us is that people who carry around an unhealthy amount of resentment are very good at nurturing that negativity in others. They sometimes succeed in reaching high office, but it doesn’t turn out well when they do. The people with whom they surround themselves are acolytes who know better than to argue with the boss. There is a direct line from Watergate to E-Mailgate. 

Haiman is an adjunct professor at George Washinton University and senior ethics adviser with Ethos, LLC.