It's Always Something

(This is cross-posted at my latest venture, a point or counterpoint blogpost every couple of weeks as Red Skirt vs. a fellow blogger Blue Skirt, at the new website aimed at the Boomer demographic, Midwest-based BoomerGirl (also on my blogroll). This time I am counterpoint to Blue Skirt, who chose the topic, "Ford's death turns thoughts to SNL". My reponse follows.)

Gerald Ford was a profoundly decent man, (as Blue Skirt writes as well), and a dedicated public servant. He steadied the country at a difficult time. Ford was right to pardon President Nixon over the Watergate scandal so the country would not be wounded for years by the shame of having a disgraced president in jail.

But he adhered to the conventional wisdom in public policy, a mildly Republican politician succeeding, (and I agree with Blue Skirt here), "our last liberal president", Richard Nixon. Ford's whip inflation now campaign was a joke, complete with WIN buttons, and his foreign policy was at best comatose, setting the stage for the Jimmy Carter disaster.

Ford was elected to congress by defeating a Republican isolationist, following the Truman lead on fighting the Cold War and opting for bipartisanship on foreign policy. As president, Ford signed the Helsinki Accords which Michael Barone describes as having "ratified the status quo in Eastern Europe but also contained human-rights provisions that in the 1980s helped to delegitimize the Soviet empire". At the same time Ford made a mockery of even his supposed commitment to human rights. He abandoned the Kurds, ushered in the death of thousands in East Timor, and repudiated the courageous Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn, culminating in Ford's mind-boggling insistence in his second debate with Jimmy Carter that Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union--taking a position to Carter's left.

Domestically Ford did not challenge the FDR big government model. Though he did veto bills to try to cut government spending, he had no positive vision to grow the economy out of recession, and Newt Gingrich justifiably described him as the tax collector for the welfare state. President Ford is not a model for a new moderate Republican mantra. He presided over the Republicans as a minority party in Congress, with a loser mentality. (It took Ronald Reagan to begin the Republican Revolution.)

My blogger counterpart on the Left, Blue Skirt, rightly raises questions about Ford's pardon of Nixon. It's a serious subject.

At the time, I was still a Democrat, having served as a Senate intern for Senator "Earth Day" Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) the summer after my sophomore year in college. I left Washington the same day Nixon did, heading home to Wisconsin for a break before going back to school. It was probably the most divisive the country had been since the Civil War.

She wonders whether President Ford really pardoned Nixon out of mercy, rather than cronyism. But Ford had made a career out of taking the middle ground, and he was approved as Vice President by a Democrat Congress to replace the corrupt Spiro Agnew. Other commentators, in Time and the Washington Post, (not organs of the Right), have also attested to his deep faith, perhaps deeper than the much ballyhooed piety of his successor, born-again Jimmy Carter. I take Ford at his word. If nothing else, he was a bluntly honest man. And while good ole "lust in my heart" Jimmy never acted on his impulses, we know Bill Clinton did. Then he lied about it, and layered lie upon lie, damaging the integrity of the presidency and neglecting our national security. For that Clinton was impeached by the House, though not the Senate. That probably worked out about right too, in the view of the American people. For though Clinton did not have even the minimal decency that Nixon had to resign, Americans do not want to see their presidents in jail. There is always an element of partisan politics that tilts the prosecution of a president, running the danger of criminalizing public policy decisions.

So let's lay that all to rest with Gerald Ford. We can hope anyway.

And if you are like Blue Skirt and grow tired of the "post-mortem hagiography", I'm sure we'll soon find something else to talk about.

As SNL's Roseanne Roseannadanna also said, "It's always something".

Some observers, as noted by Blue Skirt, have predictably used the occasion of the passing of President Ford to attack the current incumbent. Bob Woodward's earlier interview with Ford, to be released after his death, cites Ford's opposition to engaging in the War in Iraq based on the danger of Saddam Hussein's development of WMD. Blue Skirt suggests Ford should have spoken up and his counsel might have saved us all the trouble of dealing with Saddam, who Ford also described in a more recent interview as an evil man, and that we had "justification for getting rid of him". We continue to debate the war, and Saddam.

Or we could talk about the Speaker of the House and her buddy, recently seen in DC.

It's always something.

UPDATE: Brief story about the new BoomerGirl site in Editor and Publisher. Also here in a blog Advertising to Baby Boomers.