Indeed, whenever Nixon faced a crisis, as in his 1952 “Checkers” speech, he portrayed himself as a scrappy underdog battling against elites and privilege. Perlstein says that this mind-set stayed with Nixon (“a serial collector of resentments”) throughout his life and was the essence of his worldview. He named the club “The Orthogonians,” and told its members that they were “upright” and “straight shooters.” Nixon’s penchant for defining issues as “us” against “them” started when he was an undergraduate at Whittier College and sought to join a “circle of swells” called the “Franklins.” He was rebuffed and started his own group made up of young people like himself – quiet, hardworking strivers. How this happened, according to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, is largely the story of Richard Nixon and his ability to identify the resentments of middle-class Americans, articulate them, and turn them into votes. Yet just eight years later, the Democratic Party was in a complete shambles and Richard Nixon won 49 states. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was elected president in a landslide so definitive that political observers saw it as the emergence of “a liberal national consensus” or, as Johnson himself said later that year when lighting the White House Christmas tree, “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” A few years can make a big difference in the life of a nation.
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