SUPERB – AT 12:24 P.M. ET:  Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, has written a superb piece reminding Democrats of the aftereffects of Watergate.  The Dems love to think of the Watergate era as a sublime time, the time they brought down Richard Nixon, after failing to defeat him in an actual election.  Why, they saved the Constitution, and humankind, and...and, the Universe.

Not so fast, says Tanenhaus.  From Bloomberg:  

In the current debate, we’ve become used to these reminders that Watergate was a political story, not just a legal one. But the lessons are more numerous — and more deeply rooted — than we may think. While many Americans may be hoping for a Watergate-style salvation from Trump, think again: It helped Democrats for a total of four years but also set the stage for a powerful conservative backlash. America in 2018 looks a lot like America in the 1970s — divided, polarized, riven with tribal antagonisms.

Nixon was elected — and re-elected — in a time of bitter disagreements over wrenching issues like the Vietnam War and civil rights. His approach was to pit one group against another. This “positive polarization” exploited what his speechwriter William Safire called the “us-against-them syndrome.”

And...

... in fact there were two Watergates. One had come to an end when Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, assured the country: “Our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” This was the version later romanticized in the movie “All the President’s Men.” Its heroes were the intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (Last year’s film “The Post” reiterated this theme.)

The second Watergate lived on for conservatives who believed it was really about what the revisionist Nixon scholar Joan Hoff has called “the insatiable desire to ‘get’ Richard Nixon on the part of a tiny group of New York and Washington reporters.”

Post-Watergate politics was, in effect, a referendum on these two competing versions. Liberals emphasized the rule of order, and the dangers of an increasingly imperial and corrupt presidency.

Conservatives argued that the country was under siege from the people who had brought Nixon down, a “new class” or “elite” who disdained the values and ideals of middle America.

And, finally...

Many of the “Watergate babies” in Congress came from affluent suburbs, where good-government issues, like campaign-finance reform, resonated. But they didn’t speak to a lot of voters, including blue-collar Democrats, who had voted for Nixon and then been slow to accept his guilt in Watergate — as had the three in four people who, in a poll published before the Senate Watergate hearings began, agreed with the statement “Nixon’s campaign people were no worse than the Democrats, except they got caught.” Carter too failed to connect with those voters.

Four years later, the Republicans roared back, led by Nixon’s staunch defender, Ronald Reagan.
In heartland districts like Michigan’s Macomb County, outside Detroit, “Reagan Democrats” rejected their old party. It happened again in 2016, when Macomb voters who had helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 switched over to Trump.

None of this is lost on Trump, who returned to Macomb for a rally on the same night that beltway journalists gathered in tuxes and evening gowns for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

This is the Watergate legacy that Democrats fear, and they have every reason to do so.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's well worth it...one of the best articles I've read recently.

May 13,  2018