Word: agnew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Partisan Rhetoric. Did Nixon and Agnew misread the conservative trend? Probably not. But they apparently underestimated the quality of American conservatism and held it cheap. A great many American voters who are determined to defend U.S. institutions and values against the attacks of the youthful counterculture seek effective programs rather than partisan rhetoric...
...Connecticut by ten points. Prouty was six points behind. Goodell was down the tube." Nixon himself helped to replace New York's Goodell with Conservative James Buckley, and he was pleased with the play he called. He saw victory shaping up for Democrat Richard Ottinger. He sent Quarterback Agnew into the game with new instructions, pulling liberal sympathy votes back to Goodell and leaving the way clear for Buckley's end run. It worked...
...microcosm was the contest as it had been played out in state after state. The President had set an audacious test for himself when he transformed the mid-term election into a referendum on his presidency and his person. Thus he traveled 17,000 miles through 23 states (Spiro Agnew logged 32,000 miles across 32 states), and he and his party emerged weaker than before. What is astonishing is how badly Nixon and many of his candidates misread the electorate's mood...
From the swirl of contrary trends, ticket-splitting, upsets and dissimilar contests, one result seemed certain: most voters in most places opted for calm, for reasonableness, for a cessation of domestic hostilities. Spiro Agnew, and Nixon in the final days, dispensed bitterness. The current tenor of conservatism was surely there to be exploited, but not by a narrow, harsh approach reminiscent of Nixon in the 1950s...
Senator Mark Hatfield believes that Nixon, by not taking the political highroad in his campaign, had missed "a historically unprecedented opportunity to make significant gains in the Senate." That is probably claiming too much. In many places the Nixon-Agnew approach evidently hurt. In others, it is possible to argue that the results would have been roughly the same no matter what Nixon did or what he might have done. Only in one sense were the voters predictable this year: the polls did fairly well in forecasting the outcome of various races. But in general, it was an election...