Well, that was some fun, though, like many guilty pleasures, probably not very healthy for brain cells.
Sarah Palin's latest disjointed assault on language and logic wasn't much more entertaining than other verbal pileups we've witnessed on the road between her mouth and a microphone, but at least it was the last we had to drive past, right?
Breath-holding not advised.
Perhaps it's because I recently finished Perlstein's voluminous and horrifying Nixonland, but I see too many parallels between Vanilla from Wasilla and the 37th president.
At Nixon's famous "last press conference" in 1962, after his loss to Pat Brown in the California governor's race, the former vice-president took his trademark press-bashing to a stellar new height, telling the assembled reporters they'd have to "give the shaft" to new candidates now, they wouldn't have him to "kick around" anymore.
And, in terms of nightly, national coverage, he was right for a while. The loss to Brown and Nixon's confused and bitter concession really seemed to spell the end of Mr. Nixon's political road. Howard K. Smith did a look-back piece for ABC News entitled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon".
And we all lived happily ever after. For a few, short years.
Because, of course, Nixon wasn't dead at all. He took a little time to write a self-serving political memoir, "Six Crises." He did some private sector work. He popped up in the occasional editorial column.
(Update: As notwisconsin points out in the comments, "Six Crises" was written before the '62 governor's race. And yes, some of the work he did for Nixon, Mudge was serious legal work.)
But mostly, he made speeches. Every two years, he crisscrossed the country, stumping for Republican candidates in the most unlikely districts, unremarked by the national press but beloved by the base (in every sense) crowds who came out to cheer his bashing of Democrats and, of course, the press, building a solid, conservative grass roots loyalty and piling up markers among Republican politicians.
In 1965, Las Vegas oddsmakers gave Richard Nixon a 1,000-to-one shot at being elected president of the United States. In 1968, American voters did it anyway.
There are vast differences between Richard Milhous Nixon and Sarah Louise Palin. Nixon, for all his bitterness and deep paranoia, was deeply versed in the world of international relations and the minutiae of American politics (he spent election nights with a yellow legal pad on his lap, tallying districts Russert-style, and his numbers were never wrong).
Palin, on the other hand, is a sad indicator of the breakdown of American education, unable to utter a single grammatically-proper sentence, even if it is placed, glowing, before her on a teleprompter. Her conception of the globe and its inhabitants, of history, science and economics, would shame a fourth-grader of Nixon's time.
Still, her plans are apparent, and they are Nixon's. She is going to ghost up her book and make some dough, coast around some friendly interviews and build on her national reputation as the "real" Republican, speaking the "truth" for the "little people," not the coastal "elites" (what Nixon called the "white shoes boys").
She is going to be the hardest-working stump mule for the Republican party since, well, Richard Nixon, firing up the crowds for congressional hopefuls from Buffalo to Burbank, building her fan base and piling up political debts. And she will come back to collect them, perhaps not in 2012, but surely in 2016, when there's no incumbency to overcome.
Her playbook so paralells Nixon's that when she told the press yesterday to "stop makin' things up," I could have sworn she grew jowls and demanded "one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then."
Like many of you, I've relished the thought of Sarah Palin as a ticket-topping opponent in a future presidential matchup. Her political extremism and patent unsuitability for the office make her a juicy, tempting target, as beatable as a two-dollar steak.
Or Richard Nixon in 1965.
But, by 1968, America was a frightened, and frightening, country. Cities were burning. Distant wars gobbled American boys with no end in sight. Society itself seemed to fracture along lines of modernity and tradition.
And, incredibly, the nation turned to one of the most hated and ridiculed losers in history to "bring us together."
Because wise observers know that you can never, ever, underestimate the power of the American people to do the worst thing in scary and confusing times.
(NOTE: I am NOT saying that Sarah Palin has the intellectual, policy or perseverance chops of Richard Nixon. I'm saying that, so far, she is following closely the script that RMN did in rising from defeated presidential and gubernatorial candidate to Republican nominee in '68.)