Nixon

November 9th, 2012

The Vietnam war and the Southern Strategy are the major reasons Nixon won the 1968 election. The invasion of Vietnam occurred when the Democrats were in office. By the 1968 election the war was no longer popular and Nixon was able to capitalize on it by promising "peace with honor." Once in office he betrayed that promise, escalated the war, and also invaded neighboring Cambodia. He was then forced to withdraw from both countries after his failure to quickly win caused the anti-war movement to grow, leading to riots, mutinies, and student strikes.

The Southern Strategy originated after the 1964 elections, when Republican nominee Barry Goldwater managed to win a few southern states while getting clobbered everywhere else. The Republicans were able to build on this to get whites who previously voted Democratic to vote for them instead. Those whites changed parties because the Democrats happened to be in power when the civil rights movement forced the federal government to pass legislation against segregation & discrimination, which a lot of whites (especially souther white Democrats) didn't like. Nixon deliberately took positions in 1968 designed to win over these white Democrats. For instance, he said the federal government should respect states rights in civil rights matters knowing southern whites would interpret this as meaning no new civil rights measures. He deliberately took positions that were vauge enough he could still claim he supports civil rights, but he knew would also appeal to racist whites to win their vote.

Nixon ended up being quite liberal, in actions not rhetoric. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, ended the draft, withdrew U.S. forces from Vietnam, improved relations with China, created OSHA, instituted price controls to prevent price gouging, and implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program. That's better than Obama. Of course he was forced into all of this by the circumstances of the time, but that's true of all Presidents.