After that, it will be interesting to see how much we hear about Richard Nixon again. Will he be studied, like Theodore Roosevelt? Mentioned, like William McKinley? Ignored, like Benjamin Harrison? Nixon was one of the largest figures of the third quarter of the twentieth century. But as his era recedes, he is overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—the liberal icon who preceded him, and the conservative giant who came in his wake, two leaders of consequence whose ideas persist decades after their deaths. With no enduring legacy to call his own—detente was at best a mixed bag; wage and price controls were an embarrassment; he may have opened China, but Deng Xiaoping was the more significant figure—Nixon now seems destined to be best known for the Watergate scandal and for being the un-Kennedy, dark to Jack’s light, ambitious and striving in comparison to Jack’s grace and ease, sweaty to Kennedy’s infinite cool.

And yet we remain interested in Nixon, welcoming him as a character the way the Brits always seem happy to see a new Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. Just three years ago we got Frost/Nixon, where we saw Nixon tortured by guilt and defeat; later this year we’ll see Elvis & Nixon, the third film about that weird, marvelous, and ultimately meaningless encounter. We have had Oliver Stone’s tragic Nixon, the Nixon of All the President’s Men, unseen and malignant, The Watchmen’s Nixon as the despot of the new dystopia. It is perhaps the unique accomplishment of Watergate, the excellent new novel by Thomas Mallon, to depict Nixon not as a moral to a story, a symptom of a political pathology, or a walking character flaw, but as a man.

(To read the rest of my review of Watergate in The Washington Monthly, click here.)

Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and economics, took as his subject today Robert Caro, who, Nocera aside, is enjoying generally excellent reviews for The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Reviewing the book, Bill Clinton not only called it “fascinating and meticulous,” but then awarded it a sort of special ex-presidential medal by saying that with this book, “Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.” (Writers get credited with many things, but providing a service to the nation is not frequently cited.) Last night I finished The Passage of Power, I’ll just say that it is a brilliant piece of work, reported by a master historian, told by a master story teller, comprehended by a shrewd and insightful student of power and politics. If I had a presidential medal to give, it would be Caro’s.

Nocera, however, thinks it’s long; and worse, it took a long time to write. “He would spend years — nay, decades — in the field, finding stray facts no one else had ever known existed. And then, when he started writing, he couldn’t stop. Other, lesser authors had deadlines, but not Caro. He turned in each volume only when he was ready, and sometimes a decade passed between volumes — so much time, in fact, that he began quoting his previous books in his newer books. Originally intended to be three volumes, written over maybe a half-dozen years, his L.B.J. biography eventually stretched to four, and then five.”

To which one might reply: So? Caro isn’t responsible for designing an emergency response system. He’s not charged with getting a liver to Pittsburgh to save the life of a 10 year old violin prodigy. And it’s not like Caro is in his room striving mightily in order to produce dreck; he’s using the time to produce quality stuff. The man has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, and, among other pieces of hardware, a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters. This is if you can take Wikipedia’s word for it, which we know Caro wouldn’t: he’d have delved into ancient archives and interviewed 150 people to vet those stats, but you can certainly see the effort on the page. If it takes a decade to produce such work, who is Joe Nocera to snark about it?

Nocera also complains about what he sees as Caro’s inconsistent portrayal of LBJ across the four volumes. “Johnson has almost no redeeming qualities in the first two books. Yet how could this same man, at the end of Volume 4, push through the landmark Civil Rights Act as president? How does Caro square this great achievement — as well as all the other liberal achievements to come — with his portrayal of the power-mad Johnson in the earlier volumes? In truth, he never really does.”

This is a ridiculous accusation. In each of the volumes, Caro has recognized the complexity of LBJ, while at the same understanding that a man is not a glass of chocolate milk, in which all the ingredients are smoothly blended. Men not only have not how conflicting and competing impulses, but at different points in time, different ideas, and different passions hold sway. Nocera’s reading doesn’t just lack insight, it’s just not correct. First, Caro does show that during this period of success and accomplishment, he nonetheless played politics with troops levels in Vietnam, and also took steps to insure that he could still manage his personal business interests on the sly. But more fundamentally, Caro shows that “the bad Johnson” was not much in evidence during the crucial two month period that is the focus of the book. Caro quotes Johnson aide George Reedy, who wrote “Almost at once, the whining, self-pitying caricature of Throttlebottom [a bumbling vice president from the musical Of Thee I Sing] vanished. During this whole period, there was no trace of the ugly arrogance which had made him so disliked in many quarters. . . The situation brought out the finest that was in him.” In fact, Caro closes the book with the comment that “this period stands out as different from all the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment.”

To sum up: one man spends decades researching a life, observes that the subject was different during one period than in others, and finds the subject’s different dimensions fascinating. Another man spends some days reading the books, observes that the subject seems different on one volume than in the others, and concludes that the biographer has failed to reconcile the subject’s different dimensions.

I’m looking forward to Volume V, however long it is, whenever it gets here.

Now Romney’s saying “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order”–a nasty canard–and Ed Gillespie is saying that Obama took “something that was a unifying event for all Americans….And he’s managed to turn it into a divisive, partisan, political attack.”

Actually, a real attack would look more like this.

Who was in charge of the country’s defenses on 9/11? George Bush

Who had fair warning that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil? George Bush

Who said that capturing Osama was “not a top priority use of American resources”? George Bush

Who said, about bin Laden, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you”? George Bush

Who pulled troops who were hunting bin Laden out of Tora Bora and redeployed them to Iraq? George Bush

And here’s the coup de grace:

Polls show that the American people believe that President Obama would do a better job handling foreign policy and national security issues by 53 to 36 percent. At the same time, voters think Romney would do a better job handling the economy by a margin of 49 to 40.

Of course, Obama is free to conduct foreign policy and national security policy virtually unilaterally; with the economy, he has to work with an obstructionist Congress.

Think it makes a difference?

Here’s another example, this time from the speech that Mitt Romney gave at last week’s convention of the National Rifle Association. “Freedom is the victim of unbounded government appetite and so is economic growth and job growth and wage growth,” Romney said. “And as government takes more and more, there’s less and less incentive to take risk and to invest and to innovate and to hire people.”

First, one man’s inadequate return is another man’s golden opportunity. Last week I was at a newspaper stand the day after the big Mega Millions jackpot was won. A customer asked the lottery agent how much the new pot was worth. “A million,” the agent replied. “About $500,000 after taxes.”

“$500,000,” snorted the customer. “Hardly worth it.”

I guess there are more than a few people like that customer–and Romney–but clearly a lot of other people bought tickets, even for that scrimpy amount. it seems to me that the world is full of people who are willing to accept various rates of return for their investments. Next month a whole crowd of people are likely to be assembled to buy Facebook stock, and I doubt that even one of them will be slowed by the unsettled state of the Bush tax cuts. They will have visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, and the thought that the government would get its cut will dissuade them not a jot or tittle.

What I think the tax levels do affect is a corporation’s decision about where to locate. I would call that a different problem, but I can see where Romney would say that high taxes affect his freedom to headquarter his company in the USA without paying a portion of profits in taxes (or without staffing up the tax department, a la General Electric, and filing a ten thousand page tax return that completely eliminates the company’s tax charges.)

But this general conception of freedom as something that is being threatened by the government is an odd complaint to have, particularly in a flourishing democracy. First, you can rhetorically manipulate this idea of freedom so that it means anything. Laws against Grand Theft Auto limit my freedom to steal a Jaguar. No one is crying about that. Besides, while freedom may be what government limits, t is surely also what government bestows: the government preserves our freedom not to be killed by terrorists, or to be robbed by predators, or swindled by unscrupulous financiers, or poisoned by people who would carelessly allow e. coli bacteria into by hamburgers, or worked to death by avaricious managers. Surely even Romney would acknowledge that government helps secure our freedom from want, our freedom from fear, and our freedom of self-expression. Second, freedom isn’t even necessarily the thing we value most. Part of living in a democracy is accepting that one doesn’t always get one’s way, and that sacrificing that kind of total freedom one might enjoy in a state of nature is the price we pay for the benefits of living in a society. Freedom is not the highest and best good; ask anybody who is reasonably happily married.

Hey you don’t need to be Frank Luntz to play this game. Everything we value can be expressed as a freedom of, from or to do something, and everything we dislike can be expressed as limit on a freedom. (“A freedom not to eat broccoli,” as Justice Scalia might observe.) But if freedom is going to mean anything in our discussions, it can’t be bandied about promiscuously, like it was a catch phrase form an Adam Sandler movie.

Or from a Mitt Romney speech.

Still, there are days when Friedman writes a column that makes you think that instead of making another trip to talk to small businessmen in Bangalore or economic planners in China, he should spend a political season at the knee of the county chairman of a political party or with the chief of staff of some US Senator, and learn something about votes, and how they’re cast and how they’re counted.

In today’s column in The New York Times, Friedman–perhaps seeking inspiration and finding himself sitting on it?–rides in a taxi that hits some potholes outside Union Station, and from there quickly moves to expressing the fond wish that New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg commit a selfless act of patriotism and spend tens of millions of dollars running as a third party candidate for president. “This election has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this. But, today, neither party is generating that mandate . . . .That’s why I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate — like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg — who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America’s global leadership before we implode.”

Bloomberg doesn’t have to win in order to pull off this miracle, says Friedman, “or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election.” The other candidates and Congress would gravitate towards him. “And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing.”

Here’s a dose of reality: the most likely beneficiary of a Bloomberg Third Party candidacy would be the far right. This is the most retrograde part of the electorate, the group most opposed to tax hikes, but also to the very idea of government with an activist agenda. Bloomberg would take votes away from Obama, and deny him the a portion of the moderate suburban vote that is uncomfortable of not outright alarmed by the right wing having such a big influence over the GOP. Romney’s dilemma right now is that he has to run to the middle to win, and his party isn’t keen to follow. But because Bloomberg is likely to absorb those votes, Romney could win a lot of swing states with around 40% of the vote, which means he wouldn’t have to move much at all. Romney would win, but he wouldn’t have a mandate to enact Bloomberg’s proposals. He wouldn’t have a mandate at all. The right wing would.

Here’s another dose of reality. Thanks to a third party candidate named Ralph Nader, America got the presidency of George W. Bush, ten years of war, mismanagement of the economy, and Supreme Court justices named John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

If Friedman is serious about this new sidelight of being Mike Bloomberg’s career counselor, may I suggest that he urge Bloomie not to spend his money in pyrrhic run for the presidency, and encourage Mike to become an investor. He should invest in the depleted stock of the Republican party in the northeast and Middle Atlantic and midwest and the Pacific coast states, and rebuild it into a going concern. Build a forward-thinking party in those places that will provide an alternative to the far right of the GOP and to the excesses of the Democrats. Create a party that is pro-business (not pro-billionare), pro-growth (not anti-tax), pro-Main Street (not pro-Wall Street), and pro-education and pro-opportunity, but skeptical about big government. It would be a large, inclusive party, with the kind of values Bloomberg at his best articulated during the Islamic Center controversy.

Bloomberg shouldn’t run a campaign in which not only he and his ideas would certainly lose. He should build a party that could actually elect him.

“You know there’s and old Irish saying–there’s all kinds of old Irish sayings. (Laughter.) At least my Grandfather Finnegan, I think he made them up, but it says, may the hinges of our friendship never go rusty. Well, with these two folks that you’re about to meet, if you haven’t already, there’s no doubt about them staying oiled and lubricated here. Ladies and gentlemen — (laughter) — now, for you who are not full Irish in this room, lubricating has a different meaning for us all.”

There’s the line Halper thinks is a dirty joke: “Lubricating has a different meaning for us all.”

Well, lubricating may have a lot of meanings, but the Oxford English Dictionary offers only three. The first is to “apply a substance such as oil or grease to (an engine or component) to minimize friction and allow smooth movement: remove the nut and lubricate the thread.” The second is to “make (a process) run smoothly: the availability of credit lubricated the channels of trade.” The third is “informal, to make (someone) convivial, especially with alcohol: men lubricated with alcohol speak their true feelings.” Drinking. Biden was talking about drinking. He was meeting some Irish people, and he saw an opportunity to bring up a cliched and by now faintly insulting stereotype about the Irish and drinking. But to leap to the idea that he is referring to something sexual?

I think there are two ways to interpret this story. One is that Biden made a glancing sexual reference at a White House function for the female prime minister of Ireland. The other is that Daniel Halper has told us entirely too much about the contents of his night table.

Ryan explained his approach at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. The US is at an “insidious moral tipping point, and I think the president is accelerating this,” where too many Americans are receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes. He said that a generous safety net “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.” He expressed admiration for people who “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

Poverty is a damned difficult problem, but any public official who diagnoses the problem by saying that the poor don’t have incentives to work is an ignoramus.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this proposal is embraced by Mitt “I Don’t Care About the Very Poor” Romney.

In the meantime, here are some stats that Steve Rattner discussed on Morning Joe last week. The first shows the percentage of added wealth–new income, increased wealth–went to the Top 1%:

1994-2000 45%
2001-2002 57%
2003-2007 65%
2008-2009 49%
2010 93%

And of that 93%, 37% of it went to the top .01%–approximately 15,000 households.

Rattner broke these numbers down further. In 2010, the bottom 99% had an average income of $41,777, and got a 2% increase in income, worth $80. The Top 1% had an average income of $1,019,089, and got an 11.6% raise, worth $105,637. The top .01% had an average income of $23,846,950, and received an increase of 21.5%, worth $4,215,743. Now that’s how to lift yourself up by your boot straps!

And Ryan wants to give these people a tax cut, and pay for it on the backs of the shiftless, lazy, complacent poor.

When I hear Romney and other Republicans and other businessmen complain about regulation, I am reminded of the first two minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. where the outlaw Butch Cassidy cases out a bank to rob, and finds, to his sorrow and dismay, that once vulnerable bank has become fortified with locks, vaults, alarms and a guard, who explains why he was hired by the bank. “People kept robbing it.” he tells the thief.

Think about that. Who complains about laws? Outlaws!

“Regulation erodes our freedom,” says Romney. Yes–our freedom to rob, steal, defraud and scam.

Now wonder people say that Romney is not a conservative. He’s not. He’s an anarchist.

It’s pretty rich for Romney to complain about how regulation hampers the economy. We have just finished more than three decades worth of financial deregulation, and as much as anything, it was the elimination of conservative regulations and business practices that led to the mortgage fraud, the over-leveraging, the hidden markets in derivatives and so on that brought on and accelerated the financial collapse. The problem that has hampered our economy for the last four-plus years is a function not of regulation, but specifically of deregulation.

At one point in his speech, Romney hearkened back to America’s innovative past. “A regulator would have shut down the Wright Brothers for their ‘dust pollution.’ And the government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Oh yeah, they just did.” Here he was speaking of new regulations that mandating new minimum performance of light bulbs. Well, for one thing, I’m sorry if the Wright Brothers would have been shut down, but I thought we all kind of agreed that health and safety standards were a good thing for workers; if Romney wants to run on a pro-black lung, pro-brown platform, well, I think he will have at long last found a position Rick Santorum can’t get to the right of. For a second thing, I doubt any inspector would have banned Edison’s light bulb for failing to meet an efficiency standard, given that Edison was establishing the efficiency standard. But is he against efficiency standards? How competitive would America’s car companies be if they were still producing the eight miles-per-hour Oldsmobile Toranado?

Nobody likes regulation. Anyone who has stood in an airport security line since 9/11 and thrown away a shampoo bottle understands how annoying regulation can be. Anyone who has put an addition on his house and dealt with local planning boards knows about dictatorial bureaucrats. We absolutely should get rid of stupid regulations, and it should be mandated that at least once a decade, every agency should audit its regulations with an eye towards eliminating and streamlining rules and procedures . The problem is that Romney and his ilk seldom point to actual stupid regulations. In this speech, he named an Idaho couple named Mike and Chantell Sackett who have run afoul of the EPA after making good-faith efforts to comply with the law (see this article). Well, if the EPA is in the wrong, it needs to be stopped; agencies needs to live within the rules, too. My friend Joe Plumeri, the head of the international insurance brokerage Willis Holdings, has pointed out how much his company spends complying with fifty different state insurance regulators, instead of one set of national regulations. That seems to be an excellent example of the pointless cost of over-regulation.

You want to complain to me about a specific regulation and why it should be changed or repealed? I’m all ears. You want to complain about how regulation hurts the economy? I’ll tell you to go talk to the people who invested in or worked at Enron or AIG or Lehman Brothers. I wonder how they feel about regulation.