Midterms, Party Politics, and Culture War Previews

 For Thursday, Schoen, ch. 6.  Presentations?

Tips on research:

• Using Google Books and Google Scholar
• Dissertations
• Sources are often most useful for their reference: links and footnotes.

The Nixon Midterms

The economy

The 1970 midterm:  Senate elections (last column) are different

 Pat Buchanan (Schoen 92):

What the Left never understood, or would never accept, is that Nixon brought the South into the Republican column not because he shared their views on segregation or civil rights.  He did not.  What he shared was the South’s contempt for a liberal press and hypocritical Democratic Party that had coexisted happily with Dixiecrats for a century but got religion when conservative Republicans began to steal the South away from them.

The Goldwater-Nixon party in which I enlisted was not a segregationist party but a conservative party.  Virtually every segregationist in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, and every Klansman from 1865 to 1965, belonged to the party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Democratic Congressional Party Strength in the South

(House: dotted line. Senate: solid line)

Military enlistments by region

Remember the hardhats? Chutzpah: Nixon campaigns against a guaranteed income!

Culture:  Richard Nixon Meets Johnny Cash.  The song that RN requested (Cash declined because he did not know it well enough to perform it on short notice.)  Welfare Cadillac

RN welcomes Merle Haggard (see the lyrics)

Nixon and Billy Graham

Nixon and the conservatives (ch. 5), Schoen 174:

As president, Nixon did, in fact, do much for the Right—but not in the way that conservatives would have expected. Moving leftward domestically, economically, and internationally, he first frustrated, then alienated, and finally galvanized American conservatives to action. Much of the political organizing and grassroots activism that forged today's Right got started during the Nixon years and the Ford and Carter years that followed.

• Buckley and China
• Reagan on foreign policy (start at one minute)
• Nixon and the Equal Rights Amendment

 Things to remember about 1972

• First presidential election with 18-year-old vote.
• First presidential election with national exit poll data.
• First nomination contest of the reform era.  Muskie was originally the front-runner and seemed likely to give Nixon a very competitive race.  REMEMBER THIS POINT WHEN WE SPEAK OF WATERGATE.
• Wallace ran in Democratic primaries until the shooting.
• Eagleton had to withdraw from the D ticket.
• Summits in USSR and China in midyear.
• Vietnam: "peace is at hand" (10/27/72)
• And an insert in Social Security checks: