TPT: Actually Agnew wasn’t anywhere as crooked as the Biden. No comparison.
In April 1968, at age 17, I launched my career as a political pundit – and probably peaked early. On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson surprised the nation by announcing that he wouldn’t seek re-election. A couple of weeks later, I told my best friend that the Republican Party would nominate Richard Nixon that summer and Nixon would select Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate. To my knowledge, no one else made this prediction back then.
Why Agnew? Having grown up in Salisbury on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I had followed Agnew’s 1966 campaign for the state’s governorship. My father had served a few terms in Maryland’s House of Delegates as a Democrat in the late 1930s, so Maryland politics fascinated me. When Agnew’s campaign visited Salisbury, I recall seeing him up close on Main Street. I can still hum his catchy campaign theme song: “Our kind of man, Ted Agnew is ….”
Before Agnew joined the 1968 Nixon-for-President campaign, he was considered a liberal, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republican – what today would be dubbed a RINO. But as he settled into the vice presidency, Agnew increasingly fell under William Safire’s word-smithing spell and perfected the art of alliteration. He soon began giving fiery speeches about leftwing “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Conservative Republicans and the nation’s “Moral Majority” swooned at Agnew’s new bad-cop routine. Read More>>>>>>