A.G. Gancarski
Richard Nixon was noted for his quotable and piquant turns of phrase over the years, and while he may be best known for “I am not a crook,” a phrase that is undoubtedly part of the national lexicon, he had other phrases that bear remembering.
One such phrase: the “big enchilada.”
Over the years, Nixon was fond of that phrase
In 1988, after Mike Dukakis selected Lloyd Bentsen as his Democratic running mate, Nixon opined, in a memo to the George H.W. Bush campaign, that Texas was the “big enchilada.” Decades before that, he referred to his native California using a similar phrase.
It wasn’t that Nixon was especially fond of enchiladas; at least, no more than anyone else from a state where the best Mexican food in the United States abounds. Rather, Nixon recognized that mega-population centers that weren’t on lock for one party over the other were where Presidential elections were decided.
New York and today’s California are, of course, reliably Democratic. Florida, however, is more purple than a Barney suit. Hence, the huge concentration of resources in Jacksonville in the 2015 election. And the expected concentration of resources from every viable presidential campaign from now until November 2016.
After Lenny Curry won the Jacksonville mayoral race, Republican Party of Florida Chair Blaise Ingoglia told me that Jacksonville was a “proxy fight for 2016.”
“It showed that we can win.”
Having covered that campaign as closely as anyone, I can tell you how they won: targeted appeals to specific demographic swaths, looking to peel off soft Democrats, Independents, and NPA voters.
Again, this hearkens back to the Nixon campaign. As Pat Buchanan observed in The Greatest Comeback, he was responsible for serving up “red meat” to his base. But Nixon could not have won the presidency, and perhaps not even the nomination, if Buchanan’s plays to the right had been Nixon’s whole rhetorical appeal.
So how can Florida be won by a 2016 presidential candidate? A winning candidate has to keep the base in line; however, pandering to the base is a recipe for defeat. Maybe in the primary, maybe in the general, but certainly.
