Matt Welch asks an interesting question today: Knowing what we now know about Richard Nixon, if it were 1972 again, and you voted for him then, would you still do so?

Speaking as someone who was a year too young to vote at the time, and had a McGovern bumper sticker sealing a tear in the rear window of my MGA, I’d vote for Nixon over McGovern in a heartbeat now. What’s important is not just what we know about Nixon, but what we also know about McGovern and subsequent history, particularly in foreign affairs, which was where the real difference would have been, since in his own words, Nixon was a Keynesian.

I have a couple problems with Matt’s question, though, or at least the motivation for it, which was to justify whether or not to vote for Gray Davis this fall. Nixon was many (bad) things: paranoid, racist, cold, politically chameleonic, indifferent to liberty (including economic freedom), a poor judge of character in his underlings. But he wasn’t corrupt, at least in the same sense as Gray Davis (and Bill Clinton) are. He never, as far as I’m aware, rawly sold policy for money. I don’t think that the comparison is appropriate.

While he should have resigned over Watergate (and should be commended, unlike Clinton, for having the integrity to do so, though he was helped by being a member of a political party with the integrity to demand it), I don’t believe that Watergate was that bad, at least not as bad as Woodward and Bernstein portrayed it. Yes, he had an enemies list, and he sicced the IRS on some of them.

But that’s not why he lost his job. Bill Clinton, after all, did the same thing–it’s just that his sycophants in the press didn’t want to report about it. You have to be of a particularly trusting nature, unfamiliar with his and Hillary’s adventures in Arkansas, to believe that the FBI files deal was just a “bureaucratic snafu.”

It was both hilarious and sad to watch Woodward and Bernstein, particularly the latter, making the talk-show rounds during the impeachment saga, solemnly intoning how unlike Watergate this was. That this was just about sex, and not about abuse of power. They couldn’t let their scandal be eclipsed by this one.

Not about abuse of power? Tell it to Betty Currie, who was called into the White House on a Sunday to have her perjury suborned. Tell it to Kathleen Willey, whose tires were slashed, whose cat was killed, and like Linda Tripp, whose children were threatened, and whose supposedly private personnel records were made public. Tell it to Billy Dale, who was fired, and then arrested, on trumped-up charges, and then acquitted, after having to spend a great deal of his personal wealth on lawyers defending himself, so Hillary could get “her people” into the White House travel office. Tell it to Judicial Watch, whose IRS audit occurred two weeks after a complaining letter went to the White House from a Democrat on the Hill.

It’s been often said that Clinton gave his enemies the opportunity that they were seeking. So did Nixon. What was different was the nature of their enemies. Nixon lost his job because, just as the press adored Clinton, they hated Nixon with a fiery passion. Once they caught him at actual criminality, and (unlike Clinton, he, for whatever reason, didn’t dispose of the evidence), they tore him apart like a shiver of famished sharks.

Which brings us to Mr. Davis. He has become so unloved, that even the mainstream press has overcome their traditional worship of all things Democratic, and even after the (so far) lousy campaign, and the adverse decision in the lawsuit, Bill Simon still has a chance to beat him. It’s not necessary for the press to push his candidacy. All that may be needed is for them to not promote Davis, and to continue to expose his corruption and venality, and that still seems to be happening.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.