From the NYT op-ed page:
In 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on their income.
Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms….
Each of these [various state-level] reform efforts promised cost savings, but none included real cost controls. As the cost of health care soared, legislators backed off from enforcing the mandates or from financing new coverage for the poor. Just last month, Massachusetts projected that its costs for subsidized coverage may run $147 million over budget.
The “mandate model” for reform rests on impeccable political logic: avoid challenging insurance firms’ stranglehold on health care. But it is economic nonsense. The reliance on private insurers makes universal coverage unaffordable.
The funny thing about Nixon is that if you put aside the whole undermining constitutional government thing, his domestic policies actually weren’t all bad. He did sign the Clean Air Act into law, among other things.
I know you just mentioned domestic policy and not foreign policy, where most of my Nixon gripes are. I’m just always wary of what I see as a sort of reshaping of the Nixon legacy as a decent president, except fo Watergate, pretty much forgetting Vietnam.
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p>Read Phillip Roth’s “Our Gang” for some of the best satire from the time. It’s a sharp critique of Nixon, pre-Watergate.
I’ll admit to being ignorant of Nixon’s foreign policy, but to my mind its two main landmarks are 1.Getting out of Vietnam and 2.Starting to talk to Beijing.
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p>I think both of those are good things. What am I not getting?
are all the wonderful things he, and he and Kissenger, did before those two things finally happened.
included Watergate. Heck, barring a few outliers it practically was Watergate.
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but he was (or was not) a crook.
That’s the judgment of history.
First of all compared to the high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush the Watergate break-in was a minor little thing.
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p>In any case on domestic policy he was quite liberal even by Democratic standards, his healthcare proposal was pretty good considering its the closest we’ll ever get I wish it had been enacted in 1971 and not in 2008.
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p>Also on foreign policy what are we talking about. Nixon going to China was the greatest coup in US diplomatic history and he ended US involvement in Vietnam, a war he inherited from his Democratic predecessors. To be fair his peace with honor strategy cost thousands of more lives and arguably he should have withdrawn in 1968 with his mandate rather than wait until 1973 but a lot of the blame in negotiations lie with Kissinger rather than Nixon, and generals who advised that incursions into Cambodia and elsewhere would win the war quicker.
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p>The move into China arguably has produced great dividends including trade with this country, reduced prospects for war, formalizing the Sino-Soviet split and basically isolating the Russians making them easier to beat in the 80s, allowing for the greatest expansion in living standards in human history, and arguably paving the war for our modern globalized world, had China not liberalized and opened up India, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe might not have either.
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p>Now Im no apologist, all of these great accomplishments are tainted by the legacy of Watergate and the tapes reveal a very twisted and paranoid leader, and that legacy will never be erased. But on policy alone he was a fairly good President especially compared with the people that came after him.
LOL!!
One, if Nixon was a crook in regards the Watergate break-in, it would have been at least as an accomplice after the fact. We will never know whether he had anything to do with the planning of the break-in (which would have made him a co-conspirator) because of Gerry Ford’s ill-advised pardon.
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p>On the other hand, it should be recognized the “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause refers to political actions–crimes against the state whereby sufficient numbers of citizesns lose trust in the official to warrant his or her removal. There is no provision in the US constitution for recall, and this is the substitute.
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p>Two, Nixon did indeed inherit the Vietnam War from previous Democratic administrations, but those previous Democratic administrations inherited the war from (ta da!) Eisenhower. There was a long line of misadventures along the way, and they cannot be laid at the feet of any particular party.
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p>Nixon was, indeed, deceptive. Despite his claim, it was clear that he had no “secret plan” for winning in Vietnam (whatever that might have meant). But unlike the current petulent child US president GWBush, eventually Nixon began a withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam, so that there were minimal numbers of US hostages when Congress finally pulled the plug in 1974-75. The current petulet child president would keep US forces in Iraq essentially as hostages, essentially preventing Congress from withdrawing funding from the war.
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p>Regarding jconway’s Now Im no apologist indeed you are. But you must understand what an “apologist” is. An apologist is a defender: a Christian apologist is someone who defends Christian thought (whatever that means, there are so many different trends of Christian thought). It is not what it sounds: one who makes excuses for.