Forty years ago, Richard Nixon reached into the State House in Annapolis and plucked maybe the least known candidate for vice president in all of American history before somebody named Sarah Palin showed up the other day.
Nixon’s guy was Spiro Agnew, who was known far and wide across America as Spiro Who? Agnew had been governor of Maryland for about a year. Sarah Palin’s been governor of Alaska for about a year and a half. Before he was governor, Agnew was Baltimore County executive for one term. The suburbs were exploding back then. Before she was governor, Palin was mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska, population 8,500. That’s slightly more than Frostburg, and slightly less than Bel Air.
When Nixon named him as his running mate, Agnew stepped in front of a swarm of reporters and TV cameras and declared, “I know that Spiro Agnew is not exactly a household name.”
It was a nice, self-effacing moment that vanished almost immediately. The Democrats attacked him brutally. They ran one radio spot where a voice said, “Spiro Agnew,” and the rest of the ad contained nothing but people snickering. They ran another that said, “He’s a heartbeat away from the presidency,” while a heart monitor pulsed in the background.
There were two effects: Agnew was turned into a national punchline (at least among Democrats). And he struck back. He became Nixon’s Nixon, a pugnacious fighter and the point man as the Republicans put together their Southern strategy on race and their simultaneous accusations that newspaper and broadcast reporters comprised some sort of vast liberal conspiracy. They’ve been saying it ever since, and never mind massive evidence to the contrary. It became a talking point, and a distraction.
All of this resonates now with John McCain’s pick of Palin as his running mate. The lessons of Agnew should not be lost on the Democrats. They attack her, they’ll be perceived as piling on. They attack her, they miss the bigger picture: the miserable shape the country’s in.
Forty years ago, Republicans worried that voters wouldn’t have time to get to know Agnew between the convention and election day. In fact, they got to know him well enough to elect him. It was the early blossoming of television, where strangers became intimates in quick order.
Today, Palin’s been on the national stage for less than a week, and we already know the most intimate sexual details of her 17-year-old daughter, and the marital troubles of Palin’s sister and ex-brother-in-law.
We’ll get to know her — at least, in a certain way. We got to know Dan Quayle. (Yes, yes: We knew Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle was a friend of ours. And, Sarah Palin, you’re no Dan Quayle.) And, on short notice, we got to know Agnew, too.
But maybe we didn’t get to know them as well as we thought we did. Agnew was billed as a moderate when Nixon discovered him.
He’d run for county executive and kept his mouth shut while an opponent named George Mahoney was spouting racist slogans.
But it was April of ’68 that really sold Nixon on Agnew — when, in the emotional aftermath of the Martin Luther King assassination and the riots that followed, Agnew summoned a gathering of African-American leaders and publicly berated them for not stopping the riots — as though they had some kind of control over a tidal wave, as though their grief over King’s assassination wasn’t profound enough without Agnew piling on.
And that’s the Agnew that the country never saw until he’d already been elected.
Nor, for that matter, did anybody discover the Agnew habit of accepting little white envelopes stuffed with money until he’d been in the White House for a full term.
So the Democrats shouldn’t be too quick to imagine Palin as easy pickings. With modern technology, we learn a lot in a hurry — but not necessarily a lot of depth. We get to see a politician’s public moves, personalities molded for TV cameras.
On the surface, Palin carries herself well. She can deliver a speech. And she’s got an army of professionals standing by to recite all the appropriate party lines: She’s working class; she’s a woman; she’s titular head of the Alaska National Guard.
Does any of this make her the most qualified person in America to take over as president? Of course not. It insults intelligent people in both parties to make such a claim. But it didn’t stop Agnew from reaching the White House. Quayle, either.
