10 January 2008

Dirty Tricks


I found myself misting up this morning when I heard the news that my man Bill Richardson is dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

I was emotional, not so much for Bill, though I know he is disappointed, nor for the American People, though I care for them deeply in the aggregate. What hit me hard was was the prospect that I will now never have the opportunity to be picked to be the next Secretary of Defense, or Intelligence, or whatever.

I looked at the pile of receipts for my donations to the Richardson campaign. I sighed deeply. Easy come, easy go.

I tried out the emotion, experimentally. Not full-scale tears, mind you, but a certain tight lip and full eye. Not the full Bill Clinton, I thought, which was when you knew for sure he was telling a whopper. Something more nuanced that conveyed resigned sadness coupled with optimism and hope.

It seemed to give me a more human aspect, I thought, looking back at myself in the mirrored doors of the closet. More approachable, somehow. Almost Presidential, I thought, in an unconventional way. I imagined myself in a long black car-coat in a driving snowstorm in 1972, the first Presidential election in which I cast a vote.

Ed Muskie could not pull it off in 1972, and wept for the media during a late February snowstorm in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Actually, it was a lot more complicated than that. The publisher of the Union-Leader was a mean-spirited jerk named William Loeb. Or maybe he was a courageous fighting journalist. It is hard to tell from this distance. I do know that he took advantage of his little town's accidental prominence in the electoral calendar to make his papers, and is personal opinions a periodic national voice.

Ed was the senior Senator from Maine at the time, and a tall Lincoln-esque figure. It was a momentous time in the nation. The collective lunacy of the previous decade had not yet run its course. The central cities were blighted and burned out. Inflation was running at a rate that would be characterized as disastrous today, a war was raging out of control, and the future looked bleak.

It was worse then than it is now, since the Russians were armed to the teeth and appeared to be ready to send the tanks into Europe through the Fulda Gap before we could execute the Administration's secret plan to win the war with honor.

That plan turned out to be highly nuanced and multi-leveled. It involved negotiating hopefully with people who should not have been trusted while transferring responsibility for the war to the locals while pulling out unilaterally.

Muskie, for his part, was on the side of pulling out even more precipitously. At that moment, he was the Democratic front-runner against incumbent President Dick Nixon, who had established a Dirty Tricks squad to make mischief on his prospective opponents.

There are those who demonize operatives like Carl Rove, but think back for a second at how he learned about the way the world worked. The Dirty Tricks squad was world class, as we found out later, watching the television in rapt fascination of the coverage of the Watergate investigation, kicked off by crusading journalists.

The Nixon Dirty Tricks unit planted a forged letter with Loeb, which purported that Muskie had made disparaging remarks about French-Canadian Americans, an insignificant demographic nationally, but highly significant in a state that shared a common border with our neighbor to the Great White North.

It came to be called The Canuck Letter, and it included some aspersions about Jane Muskie, including the fact that she liked to drink, swear and party hard.

Although Jane sounded like fun, those were fighting words.

Ed did what he thought he had to do. His handlers recommended that he confront Loeb in person, and call him out, mano-a-mano.

It was a circus that day in front of the Union-Leader Building, a snow carnival. We will never know for sure if it was melting snow on Muskie's cheeks, below the craggy Presidential-looking brow, or if they were tears of rage at the injustice of the slander.

The way it was reported was the way it stood. Ed Muskie cried, said the reports from New Hampshire, and his national campaign collapsed even though he won the primary by about the same percentage that Hillary Clinton did, his campaign collapsed. Loeb never came out of his building, and a fellow named George McGovern got the nomination.

George picked Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. The Dirty Tricks gang brought us the news, reported vigorously by crusading journalists, that he had problems with depression and a regimen of electro-shocks had been prescribed to help him out of it.

Naturally, this admission of weakness helped to seal the doom of the McGovern campaign, and Mr. Nixon was re-elected. Of course, he would soon be wandering the halls of the White House late at night, weeping and talking to the portraits of Chief Executives who had campaigned before.

I dried my eyes, and got ready to jump in the shower. I wondered what would have happened if the word had spread about what was happening inside the Clinton campaign just before the election had been spread vigorously.

That there was near panic at Obama's lead in the late polls, and that money was drying up, and there was talk of conceding even before the ballots were cast. The presumptive loss, and the lack of resources for the rest of the primaries made them think about quitting.

Of course, that did not happen. But on such things turns the fate of the Republic.

I agree with Bill Richardson. It is enough to make you weep.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window