Check out The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss. It’s a blow-by-blow account of how, in the months leading up to Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey, a team of New York advertising execs and television producers (including a young Roger Ailes… yeesh) crafted and executed the country’s first modern, substance-free, demagogic television presidential campaign for Nixon.

The concept was: our candidate is loathsome and unappealing, and we can’t change him, but we can go a long way toward crafting the public’s perception of the candidate by carefully managing his appearance on television screens.

Obvious echoes to the Bush falsifying media apparatus, and fascinating also to consider the myriad of ways in which the Nixon era was so similar to the one in which we find ourselves today, socially, culturally, politically, economically:

Unpopular war waged on false pretenses with no end in sight. Meticulous Republican rollback of successful social and economic policies of the prior Democratic regime. Widening socioeconomic, racial, ethnic disparities splitting the nation into two distinct, unequal Americas. Rank executive branch corruption, venality, chicanery.

Sad thing is, this Bush administration makes Tricky Dick look like Honest Abraham Lincoln. Good thing is, if we’re following a Nixonian timeline, it won’t be long before the Bush administration crumbles in the face of public revelation of some massive, criminal enterprise.

In this prescient passage from the book, McGinniss drops by the bar of New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, the Nixon campaign’s Election Night headquarters. Seated are New York Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin (a guy who knows something about presidential campaigns and who, in his last regular Newsday column, vowed a big Kerry win) and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Murray Kempton of Newsday and the New York Review of Books.

McGinniss writes:

Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, and Bill Barry, who had been bodyguard to Bobby Kennedy in his campaign, were having a sad drink together.

Kempton had written a column that morning, which began, "We are two nations of equal size…. Richard Nixon’s nation is white, Protestant, breathes clean air and advances toward middle-age. Hubert Humphrey’s nation is everything else, whatever is black, most of which breathes polluted air, pretty much what is young….

"There seems no place larger than Peoria from which [Nixon] has not been beaten back; he is the President of every place in this country which does not have a bookstore…."

Prescient?

Bill Barry finished his drink and left. This day was almost too much for him to bear.

Breslin was talking of leaving the country. Moving to Ireland. It seemed an appealing idea.

"That’s a marvelous commentary on the progress of the twentieth century," Murray Kempton said. "Joyce begins it by leaving Ireland to be free and Breslin ends it by going back."

The child is father to the man.