Angry, restless Democrats and independents discredited my electoral pessimism last night in humiliating the retrograde party of medieval values, so why do I feel like Dick Nixon immediately after crushing the opposition in 1972, the man who, as described by one of his Cabinet members at the time, had a "joyless, brooding quality" about him?
Journalist-historian Theodore H. White attributed the victor's untimely depression to his profound dismay that "the American government ... had, without a doubt, grown too cumbersome to cope with the tangles of the post-war world at home and abroad." Nixon may have been on top, but he mostly felt cornered -- restrained by institutional custom, frustrated by bureaucratic blockades, cobbled by Congressional fiefdoms.
Nixon's solution to government's torpidity was, as we know all too well, to upend the Constitution by asserting executive power with unprecedented aggressiveness. Checks and balances were indeed cumbersome, and for Nixon, like his contemporary doppelgänger, badly in need of retirement. So off he went, reordering nearly two centuries of what, after all, had worked, despite its built-in difficulties.
Ultimately, of course, Nixon's street-fighting aggressiveness did him in. As the common wisdom goes, only Nixon screwed Nixon. In his criminal pursuit of supremacy, he and his political militia forgot, or had never learned, the limits of power and hazards of arrogance.
It's the anticipated, extreme opposite of Nixon's governing philosophy, however, that troubles and depresses me about the new boys and girls in partial power -- which is to say, their seeming timidity.
Bush & Co. make the Nixon Gang look like a paragon of good government, and if ever aggressive counterchecks and full-forced headbutts were needed, it is now. Yet if its rhetoric is to be taken seriously, the leadership of incoming Congressional Democrats has every intention of playing only footsy with the lawless executive branch -- dancing around vitally needed aggressiveness for fear of offending its expanded base's sensibilities.
For heaven's sake, why? A very motivated and very, very pissed-off electorate just howled that it has had enough -- enough of Bush's anticonstitutional crimes, enough of a pointless war, enough of middle-class stagnation, enough of utter inattention to a miserable healthcare system, fiscal insanity, environmental ruination.... Good God, one could go on and on.
But what does the Democratic leadership propose?
Timidity -- timidity bundled in heaps of mind-numbing, inscrutable tax credits and wrapped in vague, cautious references to "oversight."
Rather than first unfolding a million-word bill on some byzantine, college-tuition tax credit, it seems to me this had-enough electorate would prefer, or at least happily tolerate, a Democratic dumptruck unloading a mountain of tidy subpoenas on the White House. Here's some "oversight" for you, Mr. Bush.
But what do I know? I misread this election and perhaps I'm now misreading the electorate's mood. Maybe timidity, tax credits, new committee nameplates and the occasional request for accountability are all it wants. And maybe that's the smart political thing to do.
Aside from the politics of it, however, I do know what's right -- "right" being a little item too-often alien to politics. And what's right is an aggressively Nixonesque but exquisitely legal, street-fighting assault on the antiAmerican, anticonstitutional Bush Gang.
Before it's too late.