Louise Slaughter Proves Herself Adept at the Nixon Tape Game

At the Pro­tein Wis­dom blog this morn­ing the always estimable Dar­leen mis­takes one of the gam­bits in the Nixon Tap­ing Game for clue­less­ness, rude­ness, or a few morn­ing brac­ers too many.

Does Louise Slaugh­ter really drink that early in the morn­ing? Or is she just nat­u­rally that dense, rude and mushmouthed?

Before narrowing-​​down the search for clues to illog­i­cal behav­ior one has to ask a cou­ple of questions:

1. what is going on? and
2. what are the person’s likely motives?

The answers to each of these ques­tions show Weezy to be a skilled operator.

She had Ryan at an over­whelm­ing advan­tage.  She was play­ing the Nixon Tap­ing Game and Ryan was earnestly try­ing to enlighten her about his proposals.

If you don’t remem­ber the Nixon Tap­ing Game, it was all the rage dur­ing the Water­gate Hear­ings.  Nixon knew he had a tap­ing sys­tem.  Some peo­ple didn’t.  So he would lay a prob­lem out for dis­cus­sion and some­body would sug­gest some­thing which he would pro­nounce a good idea, where­upon the peo­ple would go to do what­ever they thought had been decided and Nixon, the tape still run­ning, would say some­thing like But of course we can’t do any­thing like that, because it would be ille­gal.  The Slaugh­ter – Ryan exchange was some­thing like that.

Ryan told Slaugh­ter that for every­body under 55 Medicare would be struc­tured just like the health care pack­age Con­gress got.  Ryan for­got where he was and to whom he was talk­ing.  He was try­ing to enlighten Louise Slaugh­ter, assum­ing that, since they were both in Con­gress, she would know what he was talk­ing about.

Slaugh­ter knew exactly what she was doing.  She was play­ing the Nixon Tap­ing Game and wasn’t talk­ing to Ryan, but to another audi­ence entirely.  So she stated, as though restat­ing his state­ment, that, for every­body under 55, there would be no health care by pre­tend­ing to believe that Con­gress had no health care sys­tem, and that Con­gres­sional Rep­re­sen­ta­tives had to hang around free com­mu­nity health clin­ics until their num­ber was called.

There’s your cam­paign ad, folks.

Yes, I voted for the Health Care Reform mea­sure that you all hate, but I did it for you.  Look at what the Repub­li­cans had up their sleeves.

And she can sell it.  Look at her district:

NY-​​28: Decay­ing Urban Areas and Fish

See the two urban areas tied together with the shore­line of Lake Ontario?  Rochester’s not doing so hot and the largest com­mer­cial build­ing in Buf­falo that’s still in busi­ness is the second-​​hand cloth­ing store.  These are the folks the Democ­rats were try­ing to impress when they said they’d off­set the impact of their Cap and Trade energy tax by rais­ing allowances for the Food Stamp Pro­gram. So when Louise airs her cam­paign ad her con­stituents will flock to the polls to vote for her.

The rural areas in between Buf­falo and Rochester would be a tougher sell.  A farmer might want to learn a few of Louise’s secrets, like how he can do his chores by deem­ing the cows milked, the crops planted, the hogs fed, and the grape vines pruned and tied up to their sup­ports while he watches TV. So the farm­ers are seg­re­gated from her district.

Even the fish might be a lit­tle skep­ti­cal, hav­ing, as they do, to actu­ally swal­low their food before they can digest it, rather than deem it eaten.

The Zebra Mus­sels, though, are entirely in her court, because as long as they get theirs they don’t care what hap­pens to the sys­tem as a whole.

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Tags: Louise Slaughter, Nixon, Tapes, Watergate