Southern Strategy

By Thomas Gangale
12 June 2003

If you’re one of those whose eyes glaze over the moment someone starts to tell you about his dream, skip on to the next item without reading further.

I've been cautioned not to work too hard at this international relations and political science stuff. Perhaps, when the alarm wakes you out of a dead sleep at 5am and a few seconds earlier you were been riding around in the back of a limo with Richard Nixon, it's time too heed that advice.

In my dreams, as the saying goes, I was engaged in conversation with Tricky Dick, still alive but looking a hundred years old (which would be about right), and several other dignitaries in the limo. At one point, Pat Nixon, who was riding up toward the front, turned around to ask me if the president was still smarter than a Marine guard and his dog, alluding to an intruder incident that had been mishandled by the official security.

I responded, "I wouldn't care to comment on the Marine, ma'am, but the dog still has a way to go."

There was an awkward silence.

I had tried to make a joke, putting the Marine's intelligence below that of the dog. No former Air Force officer would have missed a chance to disparage the Marines, I'm sure. But in the process I had also implicitly compared the president's possibly waning mental faculties to the dog's intelligence in a manner that was certainly less than a ringing endorsement.

Thus the awkward silence. If Nixon doesn’t think it's funny, it isn't funny.

I had to come up with something to recover gracefully, so I continued, this time with a hint of a drawl, "Howevah, as a yellah dawg Democrat, Ah'd still vote foah the dawg."

The ancient Nixon laughed. He knew a Southern strategy when he heard one.