We Don't Want Another Agnew

Folks in the McCain camp are engaged in one giant pity party over the way in which the media are trying to scrutinize their hero, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Let’s hope her defenders don’t drown in their crocodile tears. A more counterfeit show of woe would be hard to find.

With Election Day only eight weeks away, Sarah Palin is the least vetted member of a presidential ticket in recent history. The McCain team, of course, wants to keep it that way -- since the image they’re created of Palin as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan and Betty Crocker seems to be a winner.

The press can’t let that happen.

We fell for that trick once before, and America hasn’t experienced a similar political nightmare since 1973.

Lest we forget, another Republican presidential nominee pulled the same stunt that John McCain is trying to perform this year.

McCain’s role model? Richard Nixon.

To recall: A stunned America learned in 1968 that Nixon had asked a politically obscure Republican governor, Spiro T. Agnew, to join him on the ticket.

As with the impact of McCain’s out-of-nowhere announcement of Palin, some of the 1968 Republican convention delegates were heard to ask “Spiro who?”

At the time, Agnew -- like Palin -- had been governor (of Maryland) for only two years. Also like Palin, Agnew’s political career began at the local level, when he was elected Baltimore County executive in a campaign in which he was billed as a reformer. He went from county exec to vice president in six years.

One more similarity to McCain's surprise choice: Nixon knew very little about the nature of Agnew’s service as county executive and governor.

Nixon and the rest of the country didn’t learn about the vice president’s previous life until word leaked out that Agnew was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore on charges of accepting bribes during his time as governor.

The government nailed him.

Vice President Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to charges of money laundering and tax evasion in exchange for his resignation in 1973, payment of a fine and three years' probation.

Spiro Agnew left office in disgrace.

That he even reached the nation’s second-highest office and ended up a heartbeat away from the presidency is because Richard Nixon didn’t do his job.

But Nixon wasn’t alone. The press failed the American people, too.

To look the other way this year because the McCain camp is cynically making us out to be the enemy is to shrink from our duty.

Of course the lives of Sarah Palin’s children are none of our business.

Palin's public service, however, as a council member, as mayor and as governor, is very much the American voter's business.

Thus far, all we have about her from the McCain camp is fluff. That’s to be expected.

But Americans who go to the polls in only a few weeks need to know more about the character and integrity of Palin’s service, her use -- or misuse -- of power and the public purse, and her ability and capacity to handle a job on the scale of the vice presidency.

Agnew was a fool and an idler. "No assassin in his right mind would kill me," Nixon is said to have joked to his aide John Ehrlichman, according to Agnew's obituary in the New York Times. “They know if they did that they would wind up with Agnew.”

I’d say that judgment came about four years too late.

We can’t make that mistake again.