Good morning, it's Tuesday, Election Day in Virginia and New Jersey (Ohio also has a much-watched referendum), which means we are also officially less than a year away from the 2024 presidential contest being concluded. Although after what happened in 2020, perhaps that is wishful thinking.
Today is also the anniversary of many memorable events in U.S. electoral history, ranging from Franklin Roosevelt winning an unprecedented fourth term in 1944 to George W. Bush losing the popular vote nationally in 2000 -- but doing just well enough in Florida to make a case for himself in the courts, where the election was ultimately decided.
Also on this date in 1962, Richard Nixon told reporters after losing the gubernatorial race in his home state of California that they wouldn't "have Nixon to kick around anymore." Yes, he spoke about himself in the third person.
He was mistaken about that, spectacularly so, just as he was wrong in declaring that his appearance on Nov. 7, 1962, before the cameras in Los Angeles was his "last" press conference. In fact, exactly 10 years later, on Nov. 7, 1972, Nixon won a landslide reelection campaign over George McGovern and became the 37th U.S. president.
"I leave you gentlemen now," Nixon told reporters 54 years ago today, pausing with a mirthless chuckle before continuing, "and you will now write it, you will interpret it -- that's your right."
After grumbling during his Nov. 7, 1962, news conference about how he was treated during his gubernatorial campaign against Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, Dick Nixon went on to admonish the press against taking sides in future campaigns. It was a self-serving, but not unwarranted, complaint. And by any measure I'm aware of, the problem has gotten much worse in the ensuing six decades: The media is simply more partisan than it was and, in my view, than it should be for the good of the country.
Obviously, no president should be compiling "enemies lists" full of journalists (as Nixon did), let alone whining publicly that the press is "the enemy of the people" (as Donald Trump would later do). On the other hand, it should be just as obvious to those of us in the Fourth Estate how often such antagonism towards the media comes from the Republican side of the aisle, and to be honest enough with ourselves to admit that much of this antipathy is valid -- and to be big enough to address our own biases honestly.
I have one more thought this morning, and it concerns that use of the word Nixon spat out so contemptuously: the "gentlemen" of the press. Even at the time, everyone present knew that Nixon used the term as a polite euphemism. Thanks to the White House tapes that came out after Watergate, we know the words he used in private for members of the Fourth Estate: "clowns" or "arrogant bastards" and "sons of bitches."
Today, we'd say that Nixon's insults were "gendered," but the simple reason for that is that women were a rarity in the political press corps in 1962, and a rarity in American politics itself. But Election Day can also be a signpost in our society, in this case in the long struggle to open up politics to "the other half of the sky," to quote a much-loved 20th century English artist who settled in New York City.
"Remember the ladies," is how Abigail Adams put it in a letter to her husband in 1776. The Founding Fathers did not follow this sage advice, so the fight for enfranchisement had only begun. On this date in 1893, the state of Colorado passed a referendum granting women the right to vote. On Nov. 7, 1916, Jeanette Rankin, a Montana Republican, became the first woman elected to the United States Congress.
And, as if in a celestial nod to history, it was also on Nov. 7, 1962 -- the same day of Richard Nixon's California press conference -- that Eleanor Roosevelt passed away in New York City. "Women," Eleanor once wrote about politics, "must learn to the play the game as men do." This has largely come to pass in the 21st century, although a candid person would likely say that the results have been mixed.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
