Looking for a domino
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.
Yes, I know, if circumstances bring about the resignation of George W. Bush, that means you-know-who becomes president.
It reminds me of Spiro T. Agnew. Remember him? He was Richard Nixon’s vice-president and chief spokesman. That administration, like the present one, didn’t much care for the media, whom Agnew called, “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Or maybe that was Democrats, and the media was the “effete corps of impudent snobs.” They all started to run together.
We always loved to see Spiro T. Agnew coming. But he resigned the vice-presidency in 1973 because of trouble with the law involving tax evasion and bribery while he was governor of Maryland. Imagine the nation’s relief, the following year, when Mr. Nixon resigned and Spiro T. Agnew did not become the President of the United States.
We – people like me – now are learning to hold our breath about Dick Cheney, whose sole contacts of any kind with our world are Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and, in emergencies, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. If the best thing that can happen for people like me is Mr. Bush’s resignation, what do we do about waking up the next morning and being addressed by President Dick Cheney in a Fox News exclusive?
Mr. Nixon presents our only workable precedent, choosing resignation as the lesser of two disgraces, and claiming loss of his political base in Congress as the reason. I remember many of us wishing he had just gone on and admitted knowing about the break-in and obstructing justice, but it was good enough for us, and bad enough, really traumatic, that he was gone and we could move on. As spanking new President Gerald R. Ford said, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
People like me have a hard time imagining President Dick Cheney saying something like that. Then again, we don’t know what Cheney would say, or not say, as president. He works, after all, for the President of the United States, whose attributes do not include a frankness in speaking, or an even temper. It would be very interesting to see the extemporaneous Cheney, with the Bush bubble lifted and blown away.
Bush’s baggage is his baggage. Whatever disgrace surfaced that would encourage Mr. Bush, like Mr. Nixon, to choose the lesser disgrace, would remain in place the day after Mr. Bush’s departure for Crawford, sitting there for President Cheney to explain, on the stage of an appalled nation and a hostile Congress. If I were Cheney, facing that, I might go ahead and resign, too, citing the hostile Congress, and fly off to Halliburton and a book contract, and let Dennis Hastert take care of the mess.
“Take care of the mess.” Those are inviting words, traumatic as it promises to be. Underneath the mess, the Constitution still works, and the Republic is only temporarily a government of men and not of laws. We just need a domino to fall.
©Michael Grant 2006
What do we do now?
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.
The best thing that can happen for people like me is for President Bush to lose his political base in Congress. He seems to be doing a good job of this.
Richard Nixon, a smoking gun aimed at his heart, used the “power base” option when he resigned the presidency in 1974. “Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate,” he said in his resignation speech, “I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me . . . however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. . . From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.
“I have never been a quitter,” he said. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
Losing his political base in Congress gave Richard Nixon an out. It is the best hope that we – people like me – have, to be rid of President Bush before the 2008 election. It is not a happy option for us, or anybody. We wish, instead of hoping for his resignation, that we were cheering his presidency.
Instead, we believe that President Bush does not care about us. We are the people in the first three words of the preamble to the Constitution. We are Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who write letters to the editor – I read one this morning – thinking that creation of a third party, a party dedicated to democratic process, is our best resort. We are not polarized politically, or even ideologically. After five years of Mr. Bush, we are polarized chronologically. We are polarized against the past, and for the future.
For us, “the future is now” could not be soon enough. We know Mr. Bush does not care about us. We also know that is the second-worst thing about it. The worst thing is if he DID care for us. It is no solace to us if his millions of supporters are getting nervous. They are no less stuck with his incompetence and, worse, his indifference, than we are. They are no less betrayed than we, who are mobilizing in an unprecedented way to the news about the phone call database.
His rationale is national security. Whose? Ours? If the principle of six degrees of separation is valid, the millions of us are connected, in this database, to target numbers. How do we feel about that? Are we ready to trade privacy for inquisition? What is the price paid, in lost freedom and confidence, in Mr. Bush’s effort to find a needle in a haystack? In the summer of 2001, according to the analyses, his administration couldn’t find a needle in a candybar. That must be a difficult reality for a president to live with, but not justification to end-run the checks and balances that are the real source of our security.
God knows George W. Bush is not a quitter. He may, though, after the phone thing is weighed against the Fourth Amendment, be nearing the point where the political base convinces him that the easy way out, for him, for them, and for us, as traumatic as it may be, is, as Mr. Nixon counseled, “to put the interests of America first,” and get the hell out.
