For those fond of historical parallels, salivating over prospects of Eagleton redux, I have another example for you.
The Checkers speech. Richard Nixon was basically left to sink or swim by Eisenhower. If he could sell himself with a dynamite speech, he would be left on the ticket, otherwise not. He sold himself well and Ike said, "atta boy". And the rest, unfortunately, is history.
I'm at Georgetown listening to Rick Perlstein right now reading an excerpt from his new Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He's discussing the Checkers speech and how Nixon turned liberals into eggheads by portraying himself as a common man persecuted by political and wealthy elites, flipping the traditional Republican imagery. The speech was both a phenomenon of sincerity and a giant con, and it helped keep Nixon on the ticket.
This reads like an amazing book. I'm excited to read it.
The rise of the modern progressive movement has been a topic discussed a lot on the front page. There have been some comparison to the conservative movement; even the suggestion of a long term possibility for a progressive version of the DLC that would shift the GOP to the left. All this has encouraged me to put down some of my own thoughts and observations about the rise of conservatism. The traditional narrative of conservatism is that while the outbreak of the culture wars and polarization of politics based on ideology started in the late 1970s, the foundation was set by Nixon and Goldwater in their earlier presidential runs. I want to provide more nuanced thoughts on how what once started as a Republican attempt to split the South turned into the Southernization of the Party of Lincoln.
The reason I bring up this archive is because today Bush reached a historic milestone. His current disapproval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 66%, equals Richard Nixon's highest Gallup disapproval rating of 66%, registered the week before he resigned from office. Back then, Gallup was the only organization conducting presidential approval polls, and thus the Gallup poll is always taken as the gold standard for historical comparisons. This figure also puts Bush only 1% away from the all-time highest disapproval, set by Harry Truman in early January, 1952.
Here is a chart featuring the all-time worst Gallup poll results for every president over the past 70 years:
President
Low Approval
High Disapproval
High Margin
Bush 2
29
66
-37
Clinton
36
50
-14
Bush 1
29
60
-31
Reagan
35
56
-21
Carter
28
59
-31
Ford
39
45
-6
Nixon
24
66
-42
Johnson
35
52
-16
Kennedy
56
30
+26
Eisenhower
48
36
+12
Truman
22
65
-43
FDR
48
43
+5
Note that I mentioned above how Truman's highest disapproval was 67%, but here it is listed as 65%. This is because, for the purposes of this table, I took the single poll for each President that resulted in the lowest overall approval / disapproval margin. Truman's overall worst gap was -45, but it did not come from a single poll. Nxon's overall worst gap was -43, but it did not come from a single poll.
Update: As noted in the comments by Max Fletcher, remarkably, no President had a negative approval / disapproval margin from February 1953-March 1966. In fact, every poll taken during that time period registered at least double-digit approval for the sitting President. No wonder the late sixties are viewed as such a tumultuous time in America, as they were clearly following the most remarkable period of general contentedness we have ever seen. For the flip side, from April 1966 through August 1983, presidential approval ratings were in the net negative more than half of the time.
STATE BLOGS
I'm at Georgetown listening to Rick Perlstein right now reading an excerpt from his new