By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 12/6/20
I hate to date myself, but I first voted in a presidential election back in 1960. In that election, Kennedy defeated Nixon, thanks in part to Chicago's Mayor Daley, who waited to see how many votes JFK needed from Cook County to carry the state. Cook County went for Kennedy by a massive 450,000 votes, giving Kennedy the state by only 9,000 votes.
It turned out that Kennedy might have won even without Illinois. However, also throw out Texas and Nixon would have won. Kennedy won Texas with 50.52 percent of the vote, and by only 46,000 votes, "pocket change," so to speak, for his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, who knew a thing or two about stealing elections in Texas.
Nixon didn't think he had much chance of overturning the results in both states, so he quickly conceded and put on his statesman mantle, although behind the scenes he encouraged efforts to challenge the results. In hindsight, he should have raised Hell and taken both Texas and Illinois to court. Texas may have been a dry hole, but Illinois could have seen some convictions.
William Rodgers, then Attorney General, was both a friend of Nixon's and an experienced criminal prosecutor. (He would later become Nixon's Secretary of State.) He certainly would have been a valuable ally had Nixon thought the fight was worth the effort. Then-president Eisenhower, who didn't especially like Nixon, even urged him to openly contest the results, but Nixon didn't.
Regardless, Kennedy won the election and no Democrat ever paid a penalty for stealing votes, a precedent that seems to be continuing today. In my opinion, that is the real negative legacy of Nixon, a RINO I voted for because the alternatives were always worse.
It wasn't long before JFK charmed the socks off the nation (and Marylyn Monroe, amongst other damsels,) which I think helped his unqualified younger brother, Ted, win a seat in the Senate in 1962, where he did damage to the nation for the next 47 years, long after his brother's assassination.
In hindsight, Kennedy's assassination was a turning point in American politics, one from which the nation has never recovered. That's because it made LBJ the president, and LBJ was one smart operator; unprincipled, but smart. He knew how to use a "crisis" to his Party's advantage: in came Medicare for the older voters and The Great Society welfare programs for the poor voters, especially the black voters.
Allegedly, he famously said, "I'll have them niggers voting Democrat for 200 years." Some 50+ years later, it looks like the old bastard knew what he was doing. To illustrate, Trump got over 12 percent of the black vote in the latest election, and while that was up from the 8 percent he received four years ago, it was nowhere near the 32 percent Nixon got in 1960. That's right: 32 percent.
(I should note that even though LBJ commonly used the "n" word, he did not allow his racism to override his political judgement. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism-msna305591,)
Even then, the Democrats were winning a majority of the black vote, in spite of being the party of some pretty blatant, politically well-entrenched racists, such as Senators Willliam Fulbright and Robert Byrd. This may have been what inspired the "Southern Strategy" of the Republican Party, which sought to appeal to the Southern white voter, much as the Democrats were doing.
LBJ, being smarter than the Republicans, turned the tables on them and implemented a nation-wide strategy that has delivered huge majorities of the black vote for the Democrats ever since. LBJ may not have been the father of identity politics, but he turned Uncle Sam into its rich uncle.
He may have also been responsible for setting in motion the anti-Americanism so prevalent in our youth today. After The Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, he turned Vietnam into an American war, which radicalized young adults all over the country, especially on college campuses. Some of those kids went on to become college professors, where they propagated their disillusionment with America.
(Ironically, all the campus unrest disappeared in 1973 when NIXON eliminated the draft.)
Consequently, patriotism has joined the evils of racism, sexism and genderism as something to be eradicated, along with all the other sins of America. If, like the election of 1960, the Democrats are allowed to steal what votes they can, they will open the final chapter to the end of America:
The Supreme Court will be expanded to reflect political realities, not outdated principles; the anachronistic Electoral College will be done away with, to be replaced by popular vote totals; the "racist-inspired" Constitution will be rewritten to provide social justice for minorities; laws will be passed to bring to justice Islamophobes, climate deniers, gun owners and other enemies of the people; and on and on.
I hope I'm wrong.. My two-bit analysis is pretty superficial, but I think the slide into totalitarianism is as undeniable as a facemask law. If this keeps up, someday the Progressives will build statues honoring thier revolutionary heroes, Mayor Richard Daley and Lee Harvey Oswald.