A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon. That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in Frost  Nixon while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. Frost Nixon, a fictionalised treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theatre: Will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks.

Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognise the havoc he has inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure.

This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over”. This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.

The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 per cent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.

But there’s a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the “fin de Bush” rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else. Sixty-one per cent believe that the American should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63 per cent believe the US should withdraw by 2008.

This relatively unified America can’t be compared with that of the second Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may be a precise political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed presidencies rent by catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying for the mood pendulum to swing.

Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In this climate, it’s hardly happenstance that many Republicans are looking in desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly welcomed his candidacy last week because, in his view, Thompson is “less harsh” in tone than his often ideologically indistinguishable rivals and “a real-life version of the avuncular fictional DA he plays on TV”. The Democratic boomlet for Barack Obama is the flip side of the same coin: His views don’t differ radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.

If it was a relief to the US to see a president as grandly villainous as Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover would do this time.
NYT