The New Nixon

WHAT PEOPLE FORGET about Clinton is that she is basically a Republican at heart. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater once upon a time and even canvassed poor neighborhoods in Chicago looking for "vote fraud" by Democrats. She was president of the College Republicans at Wellesley. In 1968, at the height of America's most intense cultural debate in a century, she only abandoned the Republican Party because it backed Dick Nixon instead of her favorite, Nelson Rockefeller.

Which is ironic, because as a presidential candidate herself, Hillary has basically run exactly Nixon's 1968 campaign. Her stump speech from the get-go was all about the "invisible Americans," a nearly word-for-word echo of Nixon's revolutionary "forgotten Americans" strategy of that year. Like Nixon, she was targeting a slice of the electorate that had chosen to stay on the sidelines during a cultural war and secretly yearned for someone in the political center to restore order; it's no accident that Hillary was on the opposite side of every issue that sent lefties to the streets in the Bush years, from the war to free trade to the Patriot Act.

Her much-reported line about Martin Luther King needing LBJ to complete his "dream" was just another salvo in that effort, a subtle message to the public that the "change" she talks about so incessantly is only legitimate when it comes from the inside. Lest anyone think this is a fanciful analysis, listen to what Hillary wrote back in the day, in her senior thesis at Wellesley, which looked at the work of a Chicago community organizer named Saul Alinsky, who had offered her a job. "I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas," she wrote, "but we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't."

Ironically, after Alinsky's death, the man who carried on his legacy as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago was none other than Barack Obama, who took a $13,000-a-year gig similar to the one that Hillary turned down.

And while there's an argument to be made that none of this old history matters that much now, there's no denying the clear difference in the two campaign styles. In Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton, we've basically got Kennedy-Nixon redux, and I mean that in the most negative possible sense for both of them — a pair of superficial, posturing conservatives selling highly similar political packages using different emotional strategies. Obama is selling free trade and employer-based health care and an unclear Iraqi exit strategy using looks, charisma and optimism, while Hillary is selling much the same using hard, cold reality, "prose not poetry," managerial competence over "vision."

In Hillary's case, the Nixon analogy extends in almost every direction. To listen to a Hillary stump speech is to hear a tale of endless confrontations with enemies; at one event I attended in Iowa, she railed against the Republicans who tried to crush her over health care, the Chinese who tried to stifle her over her "women's rights are human rights" speech, a pharmaceutical industry that bucked when she passed a law requiring that drugs be tested for use on children, and a press that tells lies about her. The speech conveniently ignored the fact that Hillary (a) takes more money from Big Pharma than any candidate in the race and (b) voted to keep most-favored-nation trading status with China despite her human-rights concerns, and that she and her husband were bogged down in a scandal involving campaign contributions from the Chinese.

Hillary's campaign is and always has been presented as a pitched battle for political survival against bitter enemies, and no reporter who has watched the way she stage-manages every last utterance and generally treats the press like a gang of rattlesnakes (which they are, of course) can possibly fail to appreciate the similarity to Nixon's own troubled, hypervigilant relationship with the fourth estate.

Moreover, like Nixon, her "invisible Americans" deal is carefully couched to appeal to the fears of her own version of the silent majority — fears about energy prices, layoffs, health care, terrorism. It's a conscious decision to contrast her approach to Obama's hokey-inspirational politics — hence the relentless emphasis on the part of stooges like Penn on her "preparedness" and leadership, as opposed to Obama's airy "vision" and "hope."

From time to time, you hear Democratic insiders talk about this dynamic openly, as in the case of a "leading Democratic strategist" who appeared in the papers after New Hampshire claiming that Obama could have won a knockout if only he'd played the game right and concentrated on economic fears.

"Instead, he went for this professorial, highfalutin stuff," the flack told reporters. "A lot of these euphoria candidates, once they hit a bump, it's down the toilet."