Barack Obama is no Nixon
It might be ill-advised for the Obama White House to declare open warfare on three or four critics and opponents.
But Republicans overstate and distort. It amounts to disingenuousness and cynicism for them to compare what the Obama administration attempts with Richard Nixon's having kept an "enemies' list."
Republicans tend to be good at this kind of thing, by which I mean adopting nomenclature or semantical trickery to misrepresent and trivialize history, often their unattractive own, to try to make Democrats' actions seem sinister.
Why, Obama is as bad as we were -- that's the message.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican who labored as a youngster in the Nixon White House, says Barack Obama flirts with Nixonian darkness when his White House decides to stop turning the other cheek to critics like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, intones that Obama is "Nixifying" the White House.
But there are blatant and basic differences.
Nixon did not send his top aides to the Sunday news talk shows to talk about how they'd had it up to here with actor Paul Newman and columnist Mary McGrory, to mention two names on his enemies' list. But Obama sent his people to those very venues two weeks consecutively to talk openly about they'd had it up to here with Fox, especially, and Limbaugh.
Instead what Nixon did was ask aide Chuck Colson to come up with a secret list of "enemies," then the list got found out. The point, John Dean later said, was to identify people whom Nixon considered threats and use whatever power was available to the government to inconvenience the lives of those people. Nixon talked on tape about using agencies of the government to go after people he didn't like.
So Nixon engaged in paranoia, and he attempted vengeance and abuse. Obama engages in no apparent attempt at punishment and his administration reveals no apparent paranoia or intention to abuse.
Instead the Obama White House makes a tactical political attempt to marginalize -- to make to seem out of the mainstream -- a few of the leading sources of its detraction. Obama wants people to begin to think -- if they haven't been paying attention and don't think as much already -- that the things they hear and see on Fox may not be straight news, but Republican propaganda.
He's not intending, so far as we know, to try to use any government regulatory power to harm Fox. And his communications director says that the president, from time to time, will go on Fox News for interviews. But, the communications director says, he'll want viewers to understand that, in so doing, he will be consenting to a debate with political opponents, not a credible journalistic interview.
Likewise, Obama intends no apparent harm to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He'd merely prefer that people stop thinking of the organization in high-minded terms as a civic-minded neutral group. He'd like people to start thinking, or at least suspecting, that it's a conservative partisan outfit anymore, at least on health care.
The Obama White House wants to penetrate the consciousness of the mushy American political center with the idea that Fox and Limbaugh are out there, not altogether serious or accurate.
Most likely the tactic will fail, even backfire, partly because it's not so smart to descend to grappling with the media and partly because Republicans probably will succeed in convincing people that openly calling out your critics is Nixonian.
It isn't. Secretly dispatching the IRS or FBI on them is Nixonian.
John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.
