Jeffrey Lord: Nixon: The Republican Strategist of 2010
[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.]
Lots of Republicans had scored victories in 1946, but there was something about Nixon that set the teeth of the American liberal establishment on edge. Nixon had campaigned for Congress against a twelve-year Democratic incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, presumed to be a political Goliath, using the slogan: "Where's the meat?"
"Where's the meat?" meant, literally, just that. The federal government had smothered America with price controls during the war -- but the war was over. Meat shortages were common. Butchers placed signs in their windows suggesting Americans ask their congressman "where's the meat?" Nixon, who would prove to be one of the most astute politicians in the second half of the 20th century, lost no time in connecting the meat shortages to…. socialism and elitists.
To the shock of Democrats, Voorhis was the perfect foil. His father had been the wealthy chairman of the Nash Motor Company. He was a Yale graduate. In the 1920s, Nixon discovered, Voorhis had actually registered to vote as a Socialist, becoming a Democrat with the advent of the New Deal. The solitary piece of legislation he had gotten passed dealt with federal control of rabbits.
Nixon brilliantly painted a portrait of Voorhis as an elitist socialist, tying the shortage of meat to the idea of the Congressman as, in the words of Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken, "too woolly a thinker." Voorhis was ridiculed as the candidate of "Rabbits and Radicals."
Nixon won, instantly famous....
Nixon's theme is now seen all over America in 2010 as Americans find themselves in open political revolt over seemingly unrelated issues. From the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan to the Obama insistence that all Americans be forced to buy health care to the overruling by a solitary federal judge of California's democratically voted Proposition 8 forbidding gay marriage, to the Obama Arizona lawsuit -- the common foe is the one first spotted by Nixon in 1946....
Read entire article at American Spectator
Lots of Republicans had scored victories in 1946, but there was something about Nixon that set the teeth of the American liberal establishment on edge. Nixon had campaigned for Congress against a twelve-year Democratic incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, presumed to be a political Goliath, using the slogan: "Where's the meat?"
"Where's the meat?" meant, literally, just that. The federal government had smothered America with price controls during the war -- but the war was over. Meat shortages were common. Butchers placed signs in their windows suggesting Americans ask their congressman "where's the meat?" Nixon, who would prove to be one of the most astute politicians in the second half of the 20th century, lost no time in connecting the meat shortages to…. socialism and elitists.
To the shock of Democrats, Voorhis was the perfect foil. His father had been the wealthy chairman of the Nash Motor Company. He was a Yale graduate. In the 1920s, Nixon discovered, Voorhis had actually registered to vote as a Socialist, becoming a Democrat with the advent of the New Deal. The solitary piece of legislation he had gotten passed dealt with federal control of rabbits.
Nixon brilliantly painted a portrait of Voorhis as an elitist socialist, tying the shortage of meat to the idea of the Congressman as, in the words of Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken, "too woolly a thinker." Voorhis was ridiculed as the candidate of "Rabbits and Radicals."
Nixon won, instantly famous....
Nixon's theme is now seen all over America in 2010 as Americans find themselves in open political revolt over seemingly unrelated issues. From the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan to the Obama insistence that all Americans be forced to buy health care to the overruling by a solitary federal judge of California's democratically voted Proposition 8 forbidding gay marriage, to the Obama Arizona lawsuit -- the common foe is the one first spotted by Nixon in 1946....